SUPPRESSING the black vote is a very old story in America, and it has never been just a Southern thing.
Read MoreVoter Suppression, Then and Now | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)
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The New York Times (Art & Design)
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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.
Read MoreThe New York Times (Art & Design) At Museum on 9/11, Talking Through an Identity Crisis (By Patricia Cohen)
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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.)
Read MoreKing’s Forgotten Manifesto | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)
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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...
The Meaning of Emancipation in Civil War Memory, Then and Now (Fredericksburg Baptist Church - Fredericksburg, VA, )
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Years of Anguish III: Slavery and Emancipation
Fredericksburg Baptist Church
Legacies of the Civil War (Yale University)
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Historians and authors discuss ongoing legacies of the Civil War - the issues and controversies that are still being borne out today.
Read MorePerson of the Year 1862, Part 1 (Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia)
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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?
Read MoreRace and the Civil War (Washington, DC)
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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.
Read More"I Have A Dream" Speech Marked Civil War Centennial (Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern History event at Ole Miss - University of Mississippi)
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Author and historian David Blight connected the Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement during the recent Gilder-Jordan Lecture in Southern History event.
Read MoreThe Civil War, American oracle? (Historic Tredegar - Richmond, Virginia)
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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.
Read MoreDavid Blight Discusses "American Oracle" (President Lincoln’s Cottage, Washington, D.C.)
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
Read MoreVirtual Book Signing™ - David W. Blight & William C. Harris (Abraham Lincoln Book Shop, Chicago- September 30, 2011)
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David Blight discusses his book, American Oracle
Read MoreSlate.com (The Audio Book Club)
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Audio Book Club discussion of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels. Discussion by Emily Bazelon, David Blight and David Plotz
Read MoreForgetting Why We Remember | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)
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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,
Read MoreDavid Blight at the North Carolina Civil War 150 Symposium
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David Blight of Yale University delivers the keynote address at the North Carolina Civil War 150th Symposium.
Read MoreLincoln, Douglass and the ‘Double-Tongued Document’ | The New York Times (The Opinion Pages)
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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, Civil War Symposium (Transylvania University - Lexington, KY)
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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.
Read More150 years after Fort Sumter, forces that gave rise to the Civil War still plague modern America | NY Daily News (The Opinion Pages)
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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."
Read MoreDavid Blight: Gods and Devils Aplenty: Robert Penn Warren’s Civil War (Vanderbilt University)
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U.S. Civil War scholars from across the nation are speaking at Vanderbilt University this spring on a variety of themes, including the war’s impact on Nashville, during a series of public lectures.
Read MoreCivil War Contraband Camps (OAH in Houston, Texas)
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A panel discussion was held on emancipation, citizenship for blacks, and contraband camps during the Civil War. After their papers were presented and Professor Blight had made comments, the panelists responded to questions from members of the audience. Heather Williams moderated.
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