The Biddle Memorial Lecture: “DOUGLASS! DOUGLASS! Writing the Life of Frederick Douglass: Why, and Why Now?”

The Biddle Memorial Lecture: “DOUGLASS! DOUGLASS! Writing the Life of Frederick Douglass: Why, and Why Now?”

Lecture Film

David Blight gave the Biddle Memorial Lecture at Harvard Law School on November 9, 2016. His lecture, “DOUGLASS! DOUGLASS! Writing the Life of Frederick Douglass: Why, and Why Now?” was moderated by Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School.

To view video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN3jo7TPs8o

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A Man's a Man for a' That: Frederick Douglass in Scotland | BBC Radio 4

A Man's a Man for a' That: Frederick Douglass in Scotland | BBC Radio 4

Opera singer Andrea Baker explores the impact of Frederick Douglass and the time he spent in Scotland, the country which she's made her home. As the great-granddaughter of slaves, she's always been inspired by Douglass, who escaped slavery to become an abolitionist and social reformer but, until now, was unaware of the impact he'd had on Scotland and vice versa.

Listen to audio: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06kb0g2

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Why the Civil War Isn’t Over: David Blight and Tony Horwitz | NPR (7th Avenue Project)

Why the Civil War Isn’t Over: David Blight and Tony Horwitz | NPR (7th Avenue Project)

No sooner had the nation finished celebrating the sesquicentennial of the Civil War’s end this past spring than the Charleston massacre and confederate flag fracas reminded us that the past isn’t past and the conflicts at the heart of the war still smolder. Historian David Blight has been pointing that out for years in books such as Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. David says that America dropped the ball when it set aside Reconstruction and set about reconstructing memory itself, embracing some convenient myths and turning its back on civil rights and African Americans in the process. We talked about a legacy of lost opportunities and broken promises, willful forgetting and whitewashed history.

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Disunion: The Final Q & A (The Opinion Pages, Opinionator, New York Times, June 10, 2015)

In April 2011, the editors of Disunion, The New York Times’s series on the Civil War, convened a panel of historians to mark the 150th anniversary of the Confederate assault on Fort Sumter and the onset of the four-year conflict. Before a sold-out audience at the Times Center in New York City, the panelists – David Blight, Ken Burns, Adam Goodheart and Jamie Malanowski – discussed the origins of the conflict, the role of slavery and the immense challenges facing a still-new president.

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Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture

Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture

Alistair Cooke was a British journalist and broadcaster, who presented Letter from America on BBC Radio for nearly 60 years. To commemorate his life and work, the BBC has invited historian Prof David Blight of Yale University to present the 2015 Alistair Cooke Memorial Lecture.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education | The Civil War Sesquicentennial

In 1961-65, the centennial commemoration of the Civil War was a political and historical debacle. Fraught, to say the least, by cold-war nationalism, racism among its leadership as well as the general populace, an enduring hold of the Lost Cause on popular imagination, and a country violently divided by the civil-rights movement, the official Civil War centennial refused to face the challenge of causes and consequences. Instead, a reconciliationist, Blue-Gray celebration of soldiers' valor and re-emergent national greatness forged out of conflict dominated the scene.

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