Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 27, 2002|Volume 31, Number 4

Expert on racism during Civil War to join faculty

David W. Blight, one of the nation's foremost authorities on the Civil War and its legacy, is joining the history department at Yale this year.

Blight, who is currently on the faculty of Amherst College, is the keynote speaker at the conference on "Yale, New Haven and Slavery" being held on campus Sept. 26-28. The event is co-sponsored by the Law School and the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition.

Blight's first major book, "Frederick Douglass' Civil War," helped establish his reputation as a preeminent scholar of the period. His book "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory," published in 2001, explores how -- in the interest of reunification -- the country ignored the inherent racism that fueled the war. The book won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, three awards from the Organization of American Historians, the Bancroft Prize and numerous other honors.

Blight's books "have recast the ways we understand the central event of 19th-century U.S. history -- the epic struggle over slavery and its scars on American culture, history and society," says Jon Butler, chair of Yale's Department of History and the William Robertson Coe Professor of American Studies and History.

Blight has contributed chapters and articles to many publications, notably the widely used college textbook on American history "A People and a Nation."

A member of the Amherst faculty for 13 years, Blight is The Class of 1959 Professor of History there. He previously taught at Harvard University and at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois.

"David Blight is a historian of breathtaking sophistication and energy," Butler says."His frequent service for the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Park Service -- only a partial list of his commitments -- testify to his eager activity in bringing the best of history to the profession and the public."

Blight's Yale appointment officially begins in January 2003, but in order to finish up his work at Amherst, he will start teaching here the following fall.

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