A historian of the conflict traces the path to disunion in the 1850s — and the lessons it holds for our own era of deep division.

In the late morning of March 6, 1857, two days after the inauguration of James Buchanan as the 15th president of the United States, the Supreme Court’s chief justice, Roger B. Taney, stood among a crowd of reporters and spectators on the ground floor of the United States Capitol and formally read the 55-page majority opinion in Dred Scott v. John F.A. Sandford. Born during the American Revolution and now just shy of 80, Taney could still take over a room with his sense of conviction, and as he began to address the crowd, the old Supreme Court chamber brimmed with anticipation.

Should Donald Trump be prosecuted by the DOJ for crimes against the United States? Last week the FBI searched former President Donald J. Trump's home Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida with a warrant stating that he was under investigation for potential breaches of the Espionage Act. The move deeply angered Trump, his supporters, and signaled a major escalation of the investigations into January 6 and the final stages of Trump's presidency.

View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shG2Gh5Tm4Q

David Blight, CJ Hunt, Nikyatu Jusu, and Viet Thanh Nguyen joined moderator Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, legal scholar and civil rights advocate, at the Sundance Film Festival for a conversation interrogating how censorship, legislation, and storytelling are creating a distorted national narrative, and the crucial role of new cinematic genres in challenging these myths.

View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTqwAseP-I8&t=107s

“When I marched in Selma, I felt my legs were praying.” So said Polish-born American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) of his involvement in the 1965 Selma civil rights march alongside Martin Luther King Jr. Heschel, who spoke with a fiery moralistic fervor, dedicated his career to the struggle to improve the human condition through faith.

View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCoyQb3yQtE

The lie that the election was ‘stolen’ from Trump is building its monuments in ludicrous stories, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer.

American democracy is in peril and nearly everyone paying attention is trying to find the best way to say so. Should we in the intellectual classes position our warnings in satire, in jeremiads, in social scientific data, in historical analogy, in philosophical wisdom we glean from so many who have instructed us about the violence and authoritarianism of the 20th century? Or should we just scream after our holiday naps?

Here’s what parents need to understand about the teaching of history.

Every effective American teacher seeks the trust of society, of parents, and of the young people they teach. Public education as a whole depends on these bonds of trust. Our divisive politics regarding how to teach children about slavery, race, and other difficult subjects in school has broken that trust.

Anyone who has ever taught for one day knows that trust must be earned. Facing a classroom full of 14- or 16-year-olds with varying degrees of attention and preparation on any subject is one of the hardest and most important of all professions.

Both race in the classroom and the New York Times’s 1619 Project have been the subject of recent state legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage, both at Education Next (see, for example, “Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law,” legal beat, Fall 2021, and “The 1619 Project Enters American Classrooms,” features, Fall 2020) and elsewhere. The post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the new Juneteenth federal holiday have roused attention toward teaching the history of slavery in America. As part of our continuing coverage of these issues, we asked some of the nation’s foremost scholars and practitioners to respond to the prompt, “How should K–12 schools teach about slavery in America? What pitfalls should teachers and textbooks avoid? What facts and concepts should they stress? Are schools generally doing a good or bad job of this now?”

Historians David Blight and Gaines Foster wrote an amicus brief to the Virginia Supreme Court supporting the motion to remove the Robert E. Lee statue on Monument Avenue in Richmond. On September 2, 2021, the Court unanimously ruled that the state had the authority to remove the statue, and on Wednesday, September 8, the statue was taken down.

David Blight, Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, who served as an advisor to the team of curators at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, and Peter Salovey, Yale University President, discuss commemorating tremendous loss, the purpose of memorialization, and teaching complex history.

“The Learning Curve” podcast series

Cara Candal and guest co-host Derrell Bradford of the Pioneer Institute’s “The Learning Curve” podcast series, talk with David Blight, Sterling Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Blight shares what drew him as a teenager in Flint, Michigan to the study of America’s past, and to Douglass in particular. He explains the role of Walter O. Evans, to whom he dedicated the book.

Listen to the podcast: https://pioneerinstitute.org/civil-rights-education/yales-pulitzer-winning-prof-david-blight-on-frederick-douglass-slavery-emancipation/

A new battle is being waged over how we teach our country’s past. But old feuds remind us that history is continually revised, driven by new evidence and present-day imperatives.

Once again, Americans find themselves at war over their history—what it is, who owns it, how it should be interpreted and taught. In April, the Department of Education called for a renewed stress, in the classroom, on the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and the “consequences of slavery.” In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a formal letter, demanding more “patriotism” in history and calling the Democrats’ plan “divisive nonsense.” Like all great questions of national memory, the latest history war has to play out in politics, whether we like it or not. This is especially true as we limp, wounded, from the battlefields of the Trump era, when facts were nearly rendered irrelevant.

The American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced the recipients of its highest honors for excellence in the arts. David W. Blight has been awarded the Gold Medal for History. The Gold Medal is awarded to those who have achieved eminence in an entire body of work.

View a clip of the award ceremony: https://youtu.be/a8BtzybfGyE

Biographies are a critical component of our collective historical record; one consequence of allowing certain lives to be neglected is an incomplete historical record. At a critical moment for biographers to engage in a broad conversation about why certain lives have been overlooked and what can be done to remedy this, BIO has invited two world-class, Pulitzer Prize-winning historians and biographers to illuminate the subject, David W. Blight (Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom) and Annette Gordon-Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family).

View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVWJMbj7Bjk

What an old poem says about the search for justice following the Capitol riot

Marches and mobs in Washington, D.C., have been much on the minds of Americans of late. So, too, for James Weldon Johnson in 1930, when the longtime secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People crafted the poem “St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day.” First published that year in a private printing of only 200 copies and then in 1935 to a larger audience, Johnson’s remarkable six-page creation warrants our reading now as the FBI pursues hundreds of insurrectionists from the Capitol riot on January 6.

Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield) loves the great African American leader Frederick Douglass. He has a portrait of the former slave in his office at the U.S. Capitol. Does that make you feel any better?

Just now many Americans are weary of, indeed fed up with, Republicans’ venality, hypocrisy and lies. But if we were hoping for at least a weekend off after the second impeachment trial ground to its inevitable end, it was not to be.

For years, commentators have talked about the culture wars, but increasingly, scholars and others are beginning to refer to a “truth divide,” suggesting that beliefs held by Americans are now so different that we are essentially living in two separate realities. Reflecting on the attacks on the Capitol, the presidential inauguration, and other recent events, David Blight (Yale University), one of the country’s leading Civil War historians, discusses what it means to live in and think about prospects for unity in a divided nation.

View video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTQpK1hTd6g&feature=youtu.be

Lately, Americans seem obsessed with Civil War references—and there’s a good reason why, says David Blight.

The idea of a new Civil War has been coursing through the national conversation lately, as Americans try to make sense of the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, or the polls showing a majority of Republicans still don’t recognize Joe Biden’s election. Fox News segments have warned that Democrats want to force a “new version of Reconstruction” on an unsuspecting public.

If Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass could visit Joe Biden today, and advise him on his inaugural address, what would they say?

View video: https://medium.com/@schuldermichael/the-wavemaker-conversations-inaugural-edition-c957fe37a717

The Confederacy built a lasting myth of victory out of defeat. Trump and his followers may, too.

One hundred and fifty years after the emergence of the Confederate Lost Cause ideology, a new Lost Cause invaded the U.S. Capitol with the incitement of the president of the United States. Waving American, Confederate, Gadsden and, especially, Trump flags, Donald Trump’s loyalists desecrated the greatest symbolic edifice of America.

Trumpism has already become a lethal Lost Cause. It does not quite have martyrs and a cult of the fallen in which to root its hopes and dreams. But it does have a self-destructive cult leader about to leave power in a defeat that has been transformed into a narrative of betrayal, resistance and a promise of political revitalization.

One of the darkest days in American history played out in a barely two-square-mile area, but it rippled across the globe. Authoritarian leaders were gleeful about the chaos in the world’s most powerful democracy. As armed insurrectionists, white supremacists, and rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, the Foreign Minister of Venezuela—a failing state with rival claims to the Presidency, and shortages of power, food, and medicine—tweeted a warning about political polarization in the United States. With more than a whiff of Schadenfreude, Jorge Arreaza wished Americans well in finding “a new path towards stability and social justice.”