David Blight, Ph.D.

David W. Blight, Ph.D. is Sterling Professor of History and African American Studies and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. His latest book is a new full biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, published in 2018.

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. In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Blight’s newest books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation. 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. A Slave No More garnered three book prizes, including the Connecticut Book Award for non-fiction.

Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. Other published works include a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War, and Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Blight is the editor of and author of introductions for six other books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave; co-editor with Robert Gooding-Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; co-editor with Brooks Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era; and Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator, the book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth. The edited volume, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, was published by Smithsonian Press in 2004 and is the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

Blight is also a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times, Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Slate, and other newspapers, and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation.

Blight lectures widely in the US and around the world on the Civil War and Reconstruction, race relations, Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service, devoting a good deal of time to these and many other public history initiatives.

Blight has been a consultant to many documentary films, including, Death and the Civil War, Africans in America, and The Reconstruction Era, among others.

Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and did his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. He has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan. He was also senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Munich in Germany in 1992-93.

Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002 and served as that Society’s President in 2013-14. Board of Trustees or Advisory Board memberships include the New York Historical Society, the Benjamin Franklin Papers at Yale, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the National Civil War Center at Tredegar in Richmond, VA, Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians, and the board for African American Programs at Monticello in Charlottesville, VA. He also served on the board of advisors to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is involved in planning numerous conferences and events to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War.