David W. Blight

David W. Blight
Born David William Blight
(1949-03-21) March 21, 1949
Nationality American
Alma mater Michigan State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Occupation Professor, author

David William Blight (born 1949) is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History 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 the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Early life and education

Blight grew up in Flint, Michigan. After getting his undergraduate degree, Blight taught in a public high school for seven years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985 with a thesis titled "Keeping Faith in Jubilee: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of the Civil War".[1]

Career

After teaching at Harvard and North Central College, he 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."[2]

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 its aftermath.

Blight is chiefly concerned with studying the ways American society grappled with the war in its aftermath. His work, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (2007), provides context for newly discovered first-person accounts by two African-American slaves who escaped during the Civil War and emancipated themselves.

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.

Awards

Works

  • David W. Blight (1991). Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. LSU Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-1724-8.
  • Frederick Douglass (1993). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Introduction David W. Blight. Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.
  • David W. BLIGHT (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00819-9.
  • David W. Blight (2002). Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory & the American Civil War. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1-55849-361-2.
  • David W. Blight (2007). A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-101232-9.
  • David W. Blight (2011). American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0-67-404855-3.

References

  1. ↑ David W. Blight. "Keeping Faith in Jubilee: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of the Civil War"
  2. ↑ "David W. Blight", History Dept., Yale University, 2007, accessed 27 April 2012
  3. 1 2 Race and Reunion and prizes, Harvard University Press, accessed 27 April 2012
  4. ↑ "David W. Blight Receives 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Prize" Archived 2006-06-20 at the Wayback Machine., The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, Yale University, accessed 27 April 2012
  • Chat Transcript (14 November 2007). "Historian David Blight on two newly published slave narratives". Court TV.
  • Yale History Faculty: David W. Blight
  • "Historian David Blight to Direct the Gilder-Lehrman Center at Yale", Yale, 6 April 2009
  • The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, Yale University
  • Online Videos: David W. Blight, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, Open Yale Courses, 27 lectures, recorded Spring 2008, Yale University. Available free of charge via iTunes U.
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