The University of North Carolina agreed to pay the Sons of Confederate Veterans $2.5 million—a sum that rivals the endowment of its history department.
On the eve of Thanksgiving, the University of North Carolina Board of Governors agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) over a Confederate monument that had stood for more than a century on the university’s flagship campus, in Chapel Hill, before demonstrators toppled it in August 2018.
Read MoreIn the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, he dreamed of a pluralist utopia.
In the late 1860s, Frederick Douglass, the fugitive slave turned prose poet of American democracy, toured the country spreading his most sanguine vision of a pluralist future of human equality in the recently re-United States. It is a vision worth revisiting at a time when the country seems once again to be a house divided over ethnicity and race, and over how to interpret our foundational creeds.
Read MoreHe would see the Republicans as the antithesis of everything he fought for.
In 2012, I took part in the Congressional Civil Rights Pilgrimage, an annual trip to Alabama led by Representative John Lewis. On a Sunday afternoon I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma next to Kevin McCarthy, now the Republican House minority leader, his wife and children at his side.
Read MoreDavid William Blight, newly named as the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies, is a renowned historian who is considered one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the Civil War and its legacy. The Sterling Professorship is the highest honor bestowed on Yale faculty.
Read MoreDavid W. Blight wins the 2019 Plutarch Award for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Members of Biographers International Organization selected the winning book, which was announced on May 18, at the 10th Annual BIO Conference, held in conjunction with the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Read MoreDavid 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.”
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