David W. Blight, a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition will deliver his keynote speech on Saturday, September 27 at the Talbot County Free Library, 100 West Dover Street.
Blight, who is one of the nation’s foremost authorities in the United States Civil War and its legacy, was the 2011-2012 Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th Century Amerian History at the Huntington Library, San Marito, California. During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. He works in numerous capacities in the public world of history, including 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 has been recognized for his well-known writings. He received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prize for both intellectual and social history. He is a leading expert in the life and writings of Frederick Douglass and the Civil War (1989), and his edition of Douglass’s Narrative and W.E.B. DuBois Souls of Black Folk are widely taught in college courses.
Blight is also a frequent book reviewer for the Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the Boston Globe and other newspapers. He has also been a consultant to many documentary films including the PBS series Africans in America, Lincoln (2012), Gettysburg Address (2015), and the American Experience.
He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and he has taught at Harvard, North Central College in Naperville, IL, and Yale. For more information on Frederick Douglass Day, visit www.frederickdouglasshonorsociety.org or call 410- 463-5789.
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