David Blight Biography

David W. Blight joined Yale's department of history in January 2003 as a professor of history. He is one of the nation’s foremost authorities on the US Civil War and its legacy. Additionally he is director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery Resistance and Abolition at Yale. In the Fall of 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and delivered a lecture on behalf of the humanities inductees entitled The Pleasure and Pain of History.
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 recent Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History and six other book prizes.
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 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 (Houghton Mifflin). Blight lectures widely on 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.

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