 | David W. Blight |
David W. Blight, the newly named Class of 1954 Professor of American History, is a specialist on the Civil War and Reconstruction, abolitionism, American historical memory, and African-American intellectual and cultural history.
His 2001 book, titled "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory," received seven 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, among them the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history.
He is also the author of "Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee" and a book of essays titled "Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War." He edited and wrote the introductions for six other books, including "When This Cruel War is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster," "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave," "The Souls of Black Folk" (co-edited with Robert Gooding-Williams), "Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era" (with Brooks Simpson) and a reprint of Caleb Bingham's "The Columbian Orator," a book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth.
Blight's edited volume "Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory" will be published by the Smithsonian Press next year as the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati. Blight is also one of the authors of the bestselling college-level American history textbook "A People and a Nation."
The historian joined the Yale faculty in January 2003 after teaching for 13 years at Amherst College, Massachusetts. He was the Senior Fulbright Professor at the University of Munich's Amerika Institut in Germany and also taught at Harvard University and North Central College in Illinois. He was a public high school teacher for seven years in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Michigan State University and a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Blight teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service. He has been a consultant to several documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series "Africans in America" and the forthcoming "The Reconstruction Era."
In 2002, Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians.
T H I S
Blight appointed Class of 1954
Professor of American History
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