David W Blight

Updated on Dec 11, 2023

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Nationality American Name David Blight		Occupation Professor Role Professor

Full Name David William Blight Education Michigan State University, University of Wisconsin-Madison Awards Lincoln Prize, Bancroft Prize, Frederick Douglass Prize, Merle Curti Award, James A. Rawley Prize Books Race and Reunion, A People and a Nation, Beyond the battlefield, Frederick Douglass' Civil War, When This Cruel War Is over: T Similar People Eric Foner, Robert Gooding‑Williams, W E B Du Bois, Bruce Catton, Mark Twain

The civil war and the forging of character david w blight ph d

David William Blight (born 1949) is a professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Previously, Blight was a professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won major historical awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Public program david w blight

Early life and education

Blight grew up in Flint, Michigan (the name Blight is of Cornish origin). After getting his undergraduate degree, Blight taught in a public high school for seven years. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985 with thesis titled Keeping Faith in Jubilee: Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of the Civil War.

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 received numerous major historical awards, as 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."

It has been a seminal work in the enlarging field of memory studies.

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 at Yale University. 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 men 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, available online.

Awards

2001 Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.

2002 Bancroft Prize; co-winner, James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; 2002 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; Merle Curti Award; and Lincoln Prize for Race and Reunion

2008 Connecticut Book Prize for A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation

2012 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era

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.

References

David W. Blight Wikipedia

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