By Lisa Prevost
Three of Yale’s most esteemed historians will team up next fall to teach a course exploring the nature of American identity from 1776 to the present as part of the 2025 DeVane Lecture course, an annual lecture series that is open to the public at no charge.
David Blight, Joanne Freeman, and Beverly Gage, all professors in the Department of History in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, will teach “America at 250: A History,” a semester-long course that will explore a wide range of thought-provoking questions in advance of the nation’s 250th birthday in 2026.
“I think 2026 is going to be a moment where lots of people are thinking about the history of the United States, the present, and the future,” said Gage, the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History. “We’d like people to get a longer view of the range of ways the U.S. has existed as a nation, thought about itself as a nation, acted as a nation.”
Members of the Yale and New Haven communities are invited to attend the lecture series at no cost, although advance registration is required. Yale undergraduates may enroll in the course for credit. Registration opens April 15.
All three scholars will deliver the course’s first and final lectures together, as an introduction and a wrap-up. In between, they will each deliver eight lectures individually based on their areas of expertise.
Freeman, the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and of American Studies, and an expert in the revolutionary and early national periods of American history, will cover the period from the Revolution up through the 1830s, touching on such topics as the birth of party politics, the nature of “Jacksonian democracy,” and the rise of the reform and protest movements.
Blight, who is Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and one of the country’s foremost authorities on the history of slavery and the Civil War, will cover the Civil War era up through Reconstruction and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws.
Gage, who is currently writing a book on the nation’s past to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, will pick up in the 1890s and continue through the end of the 20th century, addressing debates around immigration, wealth inequality, and the creation of the social welfare state.
Each lecture will be framed around one big question, Freeman said.
“There are big questions about democracy, about what American ideals really are, how our government really works,” she said. “Given the deliberate way in which this country was formed, given that the founding generation saw what they were doing as an experiment, over time America has been figuring out what it is. There’s a been a lot of improv and guesswork and struggling.”
Each class will be recorded and be available to view on Yale’s YouTube channel.
And each Thursday, at the conclusion of each lecture, the three scholars will convene at the Yale Broadcast Studio to record a conversation between themselves about the week’s lectures and readings, merging their collective knowledge to “bounce ideas off each other,” Freeman said.
All three historians are eminent authorities in their fields.
Blight won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in history for his book “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” while Gage won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for biography/autobiography for her book, “G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century.”
Freeman is known for her prize-winning work on the Founders, party politics and violence in Congress, and is one of the nation’s leading experts on Alexander Hamilton; two of her books were used by Lin Manuel-Miranda while writing his Broadway hit, “Hamilton: An American Musical.
The DeVane Lectures series, established in 1969, is named for William Clyde DeVane, dean of Yale College from 1939 to 1963.
Members of the public must register for the DeVane Lectures on the course website. Registration begins on April 15. Beginning on Aug. 27, lectures will take place, in-person only, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 11:35 a.m. to 12:25 p.m. at a location to be determined later.
Article in YaleNews: https://news.yale.edu/2025/04/11/three-esteemed-yale-historians-explore-america-250-2025-devane-lectures