David W. Blight is awarded the 2019 Christopher Award for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster). The Christopher Awards were created in 1949 to celebrate writers, producers, directors, authors and illustrators whose work “affirms the highest values of the human spirit” and reflects the Christopher motto, “It’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.” The 70th annual Christopher Award winners highlight empathy, faith, and loving your neighbor.
Read MoreThe 62nd annual Francis Parkman Prize is awarded to David W. Blight for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster).
Blight has written a biography of a “radical patriot,” who was both a fierce critic of his country and an ardent proponent of its values. This sweeping biography of one of the most complex figures in American history seems destined to be a classic of the genre.
Read MoreDavid Blight sits down with Zócalo Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Gregory Rodriguez to talk about his 2001 book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. They discuss the differences between memory and history, the three competing stories Americans tell about the Civil War, and why Walt Whitman is our death poet.
Read MorePulitzer Administrator, Dana Canedy, announces at Columbia University's School of Journalism on Monday, April 15, that David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster), is the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.
Read MoreDavid Blight is awarded the Los Angeles Times 2018 Book Prize for Biography at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, April 13-14, 2019. The book festival was held at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
Read MoreA mammoth biography of Frederick Douglass and a new study of the 17th-century colonial American conflict known as King Philip’s War have won this year’s Bancroft Prize, which is considered one of the most prestigious honors in the field of American history.
Read MoreGettysburg College and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History announces that David Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (Simon & Schuster), is the recipient of the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Read MoreIn “Reconstruction,” an essay published in 1866, Frederick Douglass argued that even as radical Republicans (former abolitionists and their supporters) gained control over America’s constitutional revolution, this might not matter “while there remains such an idea as the right of each state to control its own local affairs,” a notion “more deeply rooted in the minds of men … than perhaps any one other political idea.” What had to be done, Douglass said, was to “render the rights of the states compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.” As “Unexampled Courage,” Richard Gergel’s remarkable book about the early legal stages of the civil rights movement, makes clear, Douglass’s thrilling goal of natural rights and federal power combining to overwhelm states’ rights remained for nearly a century an unrealized dream. Perhaps it still is.
Read MoreDavid Blight discussed his new book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster, October 2018), at the Old South Meeting House in Boston, MA, Monday, October 15, 2018, 6:30pm.
View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7pOPCvH0ao
Read MoreDavid Blight, author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” speaks with NPR’s Dave Davies during an interview for Fresh Air on December 17, 2018.
Listen to the interview: https://www.npr.org/2018/12/17/677350952/from-slavery-to-american-wonder-revisiting-frederick-douglass-remarkable-life
Read MoreTa-Nehisi Coates — bestselling author and distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute — confessed to a packed Yale Art Gallery auditorium that he first became aware of Yale historian David Blight around 2008 while seeking educationally enriching background audio for his steady videogaming habit.
Read MoreDavid Blight discussed his new book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster, October 2018) with Ta-Nehisi Coates, distinguished writer in residence at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and author of “Between The World And Me” and “We Were Eight Years in Power,” at the Yale University Art Gallery, Thursday, December 6, 2018.
View video: https://www.facebook.com/GilderLehrmanCenter/videos/369593643792722/
Read MoreDavid Blight discussed his new book, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” (Simon & Schuster, October 2018) with cultural critic, comedian, and author Baratunde Thurston, at the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy in downtown Los Angeles on November 29th. The dialogue, titled “What Does the Life of Frederick Douglass Tells Us About America?” was a Zócalo Public Square/Smithsonian/ASU “What It Means to Be American” event.
View video: http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/category/events/video-archive/?postId=98534&fbclid=IwAR1ZuyayJYw2_8NaJX6ikgiAz-_NXExTBJ9c-wKmWCLU10u_4XuHcbeS-tk
Read More“Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” named one of the 10 Best Books of 2018 by the New York Times.
Read MoreIn the introduction to Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, “My Bondage and My Freedom,” published in 1855, his friend James McCune Smith wrote that if a stranger landed in the United States and sought out its most prominent men by using newspapers and telegraph messages, he would discover Douglass. Born a slave in Maryland, Douglass had escaped to the North to become a renowned abolitionist orator and writer. He was, Smith said, the sort of person people would ask, “‘Tell me your thought!’ And somehow or other, revolution seemed to follow in his wake.”
Read MoreDavid Blight arrives in New York pulling his carry-on luggage, en route from Washington, soon to fly onwards to San Francisco. Such is the interest in his new biography of Frederick Douglass, a book 10 years in the writing and a whole career in the making, he will be on the road till December.
He takes off his lovingly battered Michigan State cap, picks up a coffee and sits down for another conversation.
Read MoreDavid Blight, author of “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom,” speaks with The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart during an interview for the “Cape Up” podcast on Oct. 2 at the WNYC radio studios in New York City.
Listen to the podcast: https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/cape-up/what-trump-needs-to-learn-about-frederick-douglass/?utm_term=.f88c7ce5ea30
Read MoreWith President Trump in the White House, everything seems under assault. Civil rights, the rule of law, our moral standing, the global liberal democratic order the United States spent decades, blood and treasure helping to form and maintain. It’s all so precarious, unsettled and unprecedented. But is it, really?
During the pilgrimage with the Faith & Politics Institute last weekend to western New York state and the landmarks of the abolition and women’s suffrage movements that were centered there, we were reminded that these dark days are neither new nor insurmountable. The scene was a panel I moderated with Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), Rep. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) and two history professors.
Read MoreIn Kevin Powers’ haunting second novel, “A Shout in the Ruins,” the Civil War and the destruction of slavery are a slow, multigenerational earthquake. The book sizzles with authentic tragedy, realism and unreconciled memory. There is no place for glory in this novel, which reveals black and white Southerners along the Virginia-North Carolina border region in two distinct time periods (the 1860s and 1950s-80s) living as though the past is never over.
Read MoreHistorians Peter Onuf, David Blight and Annette Gordon-Reed discussed defining equality and the Declaration of Independence.
View video: https://www.c-span.org/video/?446262-2/declaration-independence-defining-equality
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