American Past A Survey of American History,to 1877 Book

This extraordinary book shines bright rays of vision onto the decline of Rome, the so-called Dark Ages, and the early rise of towns, capitalism and nation-states in Europe up to 1250 AD.

Davis, a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, with seeming effortlessness provides sweeping, clear overviews blended with local close-ups and telling quotations from period sources, punctuated every page or two with insights stated so brilliantly that the reader has to pause to take them in.

Davis enlivens his writing with British understatement, humor, and ironic twists. The life of Pope John XII was “not lacking in the picturesque” – he made his palace into a whorehouse. Not long after, Normans based in Sicily “had the honor” to defeat the Pope’s army. Later, Davis remarks that as soon as St. Francis had been canonized, his wishes about the purity of his monastic order “could at last be ignored.”

The book’s early chapters burst with contemporary relevance. They describe the integration of surrounding peoples into the Roman empire. Most of them, Davis says, Romanized to some degree, while the empire became “barbarianized”, until the Roman world “simply faded away.”

Equally relevant is Davis’s acute chapter on the origins of Islam, from its idealistic foundation through its subsequent incorporation of violent jihad. Islam “embraced the whole of life in all its aspects” and did not recognize a distinction between Church and State.

Davis reveals the origins of modern France, Germany, and Italy; explains why the latter two remained disunified for centuries; and shows how parts of Europe progressed from the relative isolation of the Dark Ages to early capitalism, when trade surpassed the land as source of wealth and communal towns began to insist on their freedom from princes and the Church.

A beautiful piece of work, this book reflects prodigious learning and deep understanding.

This review is based on the first edition, originally published in 1957.