David Blight
Class of '54 Professor of American History, Yale University; Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
David Blight is a historian and professor at Yale University, where he is director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He previously taught at Amherst College and was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University (UK), the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th Century American History at Huntington Library, and a Fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at New York Public Library. The author of a dozen books, his most recent is Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History and six other book prizes.
Previously
Born into slavery, Frederick Douglass learned to read against the odds, succeeded in a harrowing escape from bondage, and went on to bear witness to its evils across the count...
“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner so famously. “It's not even past.” Indeed, the stories we tell ourselves about the past, always seen through one looking glass...