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Davis nineteen essays range in time from 1954 to the 1980s. They reflect on an academic odyssey that no one would have cared to predict some thirty-five years ago. The essay deals with such difference of subjects that it is hard to get across the commonality. They have an insightful concern with the right aspect of American social identity, especially with violence and sense of masculinity. From a range of perspectives they view such parts of American culture as murder, capital punishment Natty Bumpo and the Marlboro Man. More general subjects of social identity are raised in discussion of the American family and Mormons. Somewhat one third of the book deals with slavery and anti-slavery. Chronological most of the book focuses on roughly the first half of the nineteenth century, although conceptually and materially goes over on both ends of the antebellum period.
The format of these essays follows an unusually regular pattern. With one exception they are either about ten or about twenty pages long. These cover such variant as the westward movement in the United States, the Mormon Church. Orlando Patterson's sweeping world-wide study of slavery and the image of blacks in western art. Among the twenty page essays there are several that have long since acquired reputations as important articles.
It is not easy to discern what sort of essay still stands up best now and which will continue to in the future. Obviously, such review article as Slavery and the Post-World War Historians is partially self-debating, however useful and penetrating it once was. Also when some Themes of Counter subversion appeared in 1960, who would have guessed that it would undergo less challenge than The Emergence of Immediatism, which was published two years later. More strikingly, who in 1957 would have predicted that an article entitled The Movement to Abolish Capital Punishment in America, 1787 to 1861 would have taken to emotional and powerful immediately thirty years later.
