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.
Read MoreThe 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
David Blight | Campus, Case Western Reserve University
SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.
Read MoreA 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.
Read MoreIn 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.)
Read MoreON 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...
Years of Anguish III: Slavery and Emancipation
Fredericksburg Baptist Church
Historians and authors discuss ongoing legacies of the Civil War - the issues and controversies that are still being borne out today.
Read MoreEach 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?
Read MoreThree 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.
Read MoreAuthor and historian David Blight connected the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement during the recent Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern History event.
Read MoreHistorian 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.
Read MoreHistorian 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
Read MoreDavid Blight discusses his book, American Oracle
Read MoreAudio Book Club discussion of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Discussion by Emily Bazelon, David Blight and David Plotz
Read MoreMOST 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,
Read MoreDavid Blight of Yale University delivers the keynote address at the North Carolina Civil War 150th Symposium.
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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, 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.
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