David W. Blight | |
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Born | David William Blight March 21, 1949 |
Spouse | Karin B. H. Beckett (m. 1987) |
Awards |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1985) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | |
Sub-discipline | American history |
Institutions | |
Notable works |
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Website | davidwblight |
David William Blight (born 1949) is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won several awards, including the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory , and the Pulitzer Prize and Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom . In 2021, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. [1]
Blight was born on March 21, 1949, in Flint, Michigan, where he grew up in a mobile home park. He attended Flint Central High School, from which he graduated in 1967. [2]
He then attended Michigan State University where he played for the Michigan State Spartans baseball team and graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor of Arts in history. Blight taught at Flint Northern High School for seven years. He received his Master of Arts degree in American history from Michigan State in 1976 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in the discipline from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985 with a dissertation titled Keeping Faith in Jubilee: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of the Civil War. [3]
Following stints at North Central College (1982–1987) and Harvard University (1987–1989), Blight taught at Amherst College from 1990 to 2003. In 2001, he published Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory . It "presented a new way of understanding the nation's collective response to the war, arguing that, in the interest of reunification, the country ignored the racist underpinnings of the war, leaving a legacy of racial conflict." [4] The book earned Blight both the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize.
After being hired by Yale in 2003 and teaching as a full professor, in 2006 Blight was selected to direct the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. His primary focus is on the American Civil War and how American society grappled with the war in its aftermath. His 2007 book A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation context for newly discovered first-person accounts by two African-American slaves who escaped during the Civil War and emancipated themselves. [5]
He also lectures for One Day University. In Spring 2008, Blight recorded a 27-lecture course, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845–1877 for Open Yale Courses, which is available online.
Blight wrote Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom , released in 2018, as the first major biography of Douglass in nearly three decades. One reviewer called it "the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass" and another heralded the book as "the new Frederick Douglass standard-bearer for years to come." [6] [7] It earned the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in history and the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. [8]
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Blight addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He cited Frederick Douglass's 1867 speech titled "Composite Nation" calling for a "multi-ethnic, multi-racial 'nation' ... incorporated into this new vision of a 'composite' nationality, separating church and state, giving allegiance to a single new constitution, federalizing the Bill of Rights, and spreading liberty more broadly than any civilization had ever attempted". Blight concluded that although the search for a new unified American story would be difficult, "we must try". [9]
In July 2020, Blight was one of the 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter", published in Harper's Magazine and titled "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate", which expressed concern that "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted." [10]
Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. He became the most important leader of the movement for African-American civil rights in the 19th century.
My Bondage and My Freedom is an autobiographical slave narrative written by Frederick Douglass and published in 1855. It is the second of three autobiographies written by Douglass, and is mainly an expansion of his first, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The book depicts in greater detail his transition from bondage to liberty. Following this liberation, Douglass went on to become a prominent abolitionist, speaker, author, and advocate for women's rights.
Abraham Lincoln's position on slavery in the United States is one of the most discussed aspects of his life. Lincoln frequently expressed his moral opposition to slavery in public and private. "I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," he stated. "I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel." However, the question of what to do about it and how to end it, given that it was so firmly embedded in the nation's constitutional framework and in the economy of much of the country, even though concentrated in only the Southern United States, was complex and politically challenging. In addition, there was the unanswered question, which Lincoln had to deal with, of what would become of the four million slaves if liberated: how they would earn a living in a society that had almost always rejected them or looked down on their very presence.
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History was founded in New York City by businessmen-philanthropists Richard Gilder and Lewis E. Lehrman in 1994 to promote the study and interest in American history.
The North Star was a nineteenth-century anti-slavery newspaper published from the Talman Building in Rochester, New York, by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. The paper commenced publication on December 3, 1847, and ceased as The North Star in June 1851, when it merged with Gerrit Smith's Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass' Paper. At the time of the Civil War, it was Douglass' Monthly.
David Brion Davis was an American intellectual and cultural historian, and a leading authority on slavery and abolition in the Western world. He was a Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, and founder and director of Yale's Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
James Oakes is an American historian, and is a Distinguished Professor of History and Graduate School Humanities Professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he teaches courses on the American Civil War and Reconstruction, Slavery, the Old South, Abolitionism, and U.S. and World History. He taught previously at Princeton University and Northwestern University.
The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, commonly known as the MacMillan Center, is a research and educational center for international affairs and area studies at Yale University. It is named after Whitney MacMillan and his wife Betty.
The Emancipation Memorial, also known as the Freedman's Memorial or the Emancipation Group is a monument in Lincoln Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It was sometimes referred to as the "Lincoln Memorial" before the more prominent national memorial was dedicated in 1922.
Philip D. Morgan is a British historian. He has specialized in Early Modern colonial British America and slavery in the Americas. In 1999, he won both the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize for his book Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998).
The Frederick Douglass Book Prize is awarded annually by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University.
The Second Emancipation Proclamation is the term applied to an envisioned executive order that Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement called on President John F. Kennedy to issue. As the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order issued by President Abraham Lincoln to free all slaves being held in states at war with the Union, the envisioned "Second Emancipation Proclamation" was to use the powers of the executive office to strike a severe blow to segregation.
John Stauffer is Professor of English, American Studies, and African American Studies at Harvard University. He writes and lectures on the Civil War era, antislavery, social protest movements, and photography.
Word by Word: Emancipation and the Act of Writing is a 2013 historical book and analysis of a collection of writings by American slaves and befreed slaves. It was written by Christopher Hager and published by Harvard University Press.
Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory is a 2001 book by the American historian David W. Blight. The book was awarded the Frederick Douglass Prize for the best book on slavery of 2001.
Thavolia Glymph is an American historian and professor. She is Professor of History and African-American Studies at Duke University. She specializes in nineteenth-century US history, African-American history and women’s history, authoring Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and The Women's Fight: The Civil War's Battles for Home, Freedom, and Nation (2020). Elected the 140th president of the American Historical Association, she is the first Black woman to serve in that office.
Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom is a 2018 biography of African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, written by historian David W. Blight. It was published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster and won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Joseph Patrick Reidy is an historian of the American Civil War. He is a professor emeritus and retired associate provost at Howard University.
"The Constitution of the United States: is it pro-slavery or anti-slavery?" is a speech that Frederick Douglass gave on March 26, 1860, in Glasgow, in which he rejected arguments made by slaveholders as well as by fellow abolitionists as to the nature and meaning of the United States Constitution. The popularity of the speech led to its being published as a pamphlet.
This bibliography of slavery in the United States is a guide to books documenting the history of slavery in the U.S., from its colonial origins in the 17th century through the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which officially abolished the practice in 1865. In addition, links are provided to related bibliographies and articles elsewhere in Wikipedia.