David W. Blight

David W. Blight 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 at Yale. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in History for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018). He is the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), 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. Blight’s newest books include annotated editions of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (2013), and Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro (2014), and the monograph American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for the best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. Other published works include a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (2002), and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989). Blight is also a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Slate.com, and other newspapers, and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He has been a consultant to many documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series Africans in America and The Reconstruction Era (2004).