2012 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards (Ohio Theater, Cleveland )

September 13, 2012 in Speeches •, Awards •

The 77th annual Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were presented to “books that have made an important contribution to society’s understanding of racism and diversity of human cultures.” Jury Chair Henry Louis Gates, Jr. presented a lifetime achievement award to Arnold Rampersad, humanities professor at Stanford University and author of biographies of Ralph Ellison and Langston Hughes. Awards are also given for non-fiction, David Blight, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era and David Livingstone Smith, Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others and for fiction, Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues: A Novel. The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards were held at the Ohio Theatre in Cleveland.

http://www.c-span.org/video/?308485-1/2012-anisfieldwolf-book-awards

Is the Civil War the Revolution We Like to Forget? (Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities, Case Western Reserve University)

September 12, 2012 in Speeches •

David Blight | Campus, Case Western Reserve University

Voter Suppression, Then and Now | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)

September 06, 2012 in Articles •

SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.

The New York Times (Art & Design)

June 04, 2012 in Articles •

A Context for Terror: Choosing From the Many Lessons of Sept. 11

Patricia Cohen leads an online discussion with David Blight and other experts about the Sept. 11 Memorial Museum.

The New York Times (Art & Design) At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis (By Patricia Cohen)

June 02, 2012 in Articles •

In eight years of planning a museum at the National September 11 Memorial, every step has been muddied by contention. (David Blight is quoted in Patricia Cohen's New York Times article on the September 11 Memorial Museum.)

King’s Forgotten Manifesto | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)

May 16, 2012 in Articles •

ON May 17, 1962, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an extraordinary manifesto to the White House. Constructed as both a moral appeal and a legal brief, the 64-page document called on President John F. Kennedy to issue a “second Emancipation Proclamation,” an executive order outlawing segregation — just as President Abraham Lincoln had done with slavery a century earlier...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/opinion/kings-forgotten-manifesto.html?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As

The Meaning of Emancipation in Civil War Memory, Then and Now (Fredericksburg Baptist Church - Fredericksburg, VA, )

April 21, 2012 in Speeches •

Years of Anguish III: Slavery and Emancipation
Fredericksburg Baptist Church

Legacies of the Civil War (Yale University)

March 29, 2012 in Interviews •

Historians and authors discuss ongoing legacies of the Civil War - the issues and controversies that are still being borne out today.

Person of the Year 1862, Part 1 (Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia)

February 25, 2012 in Interviews •

Each year, Time magazine selects a single person who had the most influence on events during the previous twelve months. If the same question had been posed in the year 1862, who would Time have selected as the Person of the Year?

Race and the Civil War (Washington, DC)

December 12, 2011 in Interviews •

Three historians held a discussion on race and the role it played leading up to and during the Civil War and how the persistence of resentment and unhealed wounds from the war’s outcome and immediate aftermath have impacted racial issues ever since.

"I Have A Dream" Speech Marked Civil War Centennial (Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern History event at Ole Miss - University of Mississippi)

November 16, 2011 in Speeches •

Author and historian David Blight connected the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement during the recent Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern History event.

The Civil War, American oracle? (Historic Tredegar - Richmond, Virginia)

November 04, 2011 in Speeches •

Historian and author, Dr. David Blight, discussed America's fascination with the Civil War along with his new book, "American Oracle," on Nov. 4, 2011, at Historic Tredegar. Blight gave the keynote address during the first Founder's Day Dinner, which celebrated the Center's fifth anniversary.

David Blight Discusses "American Oracle" (President Lincoln’s Cottage, Washington, D.C.)

October 27, 2011 in Speeches •, Interviews •

Historian and Yale Professor, David Blight spoke at the Cottage Conversation at President Lincoln's Cottage on October 27, 2011. We caught up with him to talk about his new book, "American Oracle

Virtual Book Signing™ - David W. Blight & William C. Harris (Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Chicago- September 30, 2011)

September 30, 2011 in Interviews •

David Blight discusses his book, American Oracle

Slate.com (The Audio Book Club)

May 31, 2011 in Interviews •

Audio Book Club discussion of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Discussion by Emily Bazelon, David Blight and David Plotz

Forgetting Why We Remember | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)

May 29, 2011 in Articles •

MOST Americans know that Memorial Day is about honoring the nation’s war dead. It is also a holiday devoted to department store sales, half-marathons, picnics, baseball and auto racing. But where did it begin,

David Blight at the North Carolina Civil War 150 Symposium

May 20, 2011 in Speeches •

David Blight of Yale University delivers the keynote address at the North Carolina Civil War 150th Symposium.

Lincoln, Douglass and the ‘Double-Tongued Document’ | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)

May 06, 2011 in Articles •

May 6, 2011

The two months following Lincoln’s inauguration found Frederick Douglass struggling to understand and bitterly demoralized by the president’s policies, but also exhilarated by the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter. He had no interest in the new president’s oratorical olive branches to the seceded South, his poetry about the “mystic chords of memory” or the “better angels of our nature.” Indeed, Douglass despised the olive branches, calling the speech “little better than our worst fears,” and a “double-tongued document, capable of two constructions,” concealing rather than declaring a “definite policy.”...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/06/lincoln-douglass-and-the-double-tongued-document/?module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3As

David Blight, Civil War Symposium (Transylvania University - Lexington, KY)

April 28, 2011 in Speeches •

David Blight, professor of American history at Yale University, speaks about the nature of Civil War memory in the border states by referencing moving passages in the work of Kentucky author and literary critic Robert Penn Warren.

150 years after Fort Sumter, forces that gave rise to the Civil War still plague modern America | NY Daily News (The Opinion Pages)

April 12, 2011 in Articles •

In his "The Legacy of the Civil War," written in 1961, Robert Penn Warren declared: "The Civil War draws us as an oracle, darkly unriddled and portentous, of national as well as personal fate."