Writing the Life of Frederick Douglass: Why & Why Now?

press release:

David W. Blight will deliver the 2016 Merle Curti Lectures.  His talks will focus on writing the biography of Frederick Douglass. There will be three lectures, on October 26, 27, and 28 in the Vandeberg Auditorium at the Pyle Center (702 Langdon Street) located at the University of Wisconsin.  The lectures are free and open to the public.  On Wednesday October 26, Professor Blight’s lecture will be “Childhood of ‘Extremes’ and ‘Baltimore Dreams’: Slave Youth.”  On Thursday, he will speak on “‘By the Rivers of Babylon’: Words, the Bible, and the Mid-Life Radical.” On Friday, his lecture will address “‘Joys and Sorrows’ at Cedar Hill: Old Age, Family, and Fame.”

David Blight is a teacher, scholar and public historian. He is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University, and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Blight is one of the most respected scholars of the Civil War and Reconstruction, race relations, Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory.   He has been a consultant to many documentary films, including, “Death and the Civil War,” (2012), the 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America," and "The Reconstruction Era" (2004). Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as a member of a small team of advisors to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators.  

Blight is currently writing a new, full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published by Simon and Schuster in early 2018.  Blight’s newest books include editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity.  American Oracle is an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin.  Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007).  This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation.  His other books, which are too numerous to cite, include Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Professor Blight earned his Ph. D. in History (1985) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked with Professor William Sewell.  He completed his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University.