David W. Blight
homepage:http://www.davidwblight.com/
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Description

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. During the 2006-07 academic year he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library.

Blight is the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007). This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives. Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. Other published works include a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989). Blight is the editor of and author of six books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Bedford Books, 1993); co-editor with Robert Gooding-Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Bedford Books, 1997); co-editor with Brooks Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (Kent State Univ. Press, 1997); and Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (orig. 1797, NYU Press, 1997), the book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth. The edited volume, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, was published by Smithsonian Press in 2004 and is the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

Blight is also a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers, and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation (Houghton Mifflin). He is also series advisor and editor for the Bedford Books series in American History and Culture, a popular series of teaching books for the college level. Blight lectures widely on Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service, devoting a good deal of time to these and many other public history initiatives.

Blight has also been a consultant to several documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America," and "The Reconstruction Era" (2004). Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. He has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan. He was also senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Munich in Germany in 1992-93.

Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002. Since 2004 he has served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the New York Historical Society and the board for African American Programs at Monticello in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves on the board of advisors to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is involved in planning numerous conferences and events to commemorate both the Lincoln anniversary and the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition.


Lectures:

lecture
flag Lecture 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
4562 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3781 views
lecture
flag Lecture 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption"
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3654 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 3 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3265 views
event
flag HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
9021 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 11 - Slavery and State Rights, Economies and Ways of Life: What Caused the Civil War?
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3209 views
lecture
flag Lecture 14 - Never Call Retreat: Military and Political Turning Points in 1863
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3200 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3097 views
lecture
flag Lecture 10 - The Election of 1860 and the Secession Crisis
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3096 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 7 - "A Hell of a Storm": The Kansas-Nebraska Act and the Birth of the Republican Party, 1854-55
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3062 views
lecture
flag Lecture 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3054 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3022 views
lecture
flag Lecture 18 - "War So Terrible": Why the Union Won and the Confederacy Lost at Home and Abroad
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
3010 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 4 - A Northern World View: Yankee Society, Antislavery Ideology and the Abolition Movement
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2926 views
lecture
flag Lecture 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2920 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 5 - Telling a Free Story: Fugitive Slaves and the Underground Railroad in Myth and Reality
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2916 views
lecture
flag Lecture 8 - Dred Scott, Bleeding Kansas, and the Impending Crisis of the Union, 1855-58
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2905 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 9 - John Brown's Holy War: Terrorist or Heroic Revolutionary?
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2896 views
lecture
flag Lecture 26 - Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2832 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877"
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2802 views
lecture
flag Lecture 27 - Legacies of the Civil War
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2769 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 13 - Terrible Swift Sword: The Period of Confederate Ascendency, 1861-1862
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2760 views
lecture
flag Lecture 16 - Days of Jubilee: The Meanings of Emancipation and Total War
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2727 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2699 views
lecture
flag Lecture 20 - Wartime Reconstruction: Imagining the Aftermath and a Second American Republic
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2689 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2637 views
lecture
flag Lecture 19 - To Appomattox and Beyond: The End of the War and a Search for Meanings
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2612 views
  lecture
flag Lecture 12 - "And the War Came," 1861: The Sumter Crisis, Comparative Strategies
as author at  HIST 119 - The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877,
2417 views