Professor Blight’s fields of interest are U.S.: Civil War & Reconstruction era; African American history; American cultural & intellectual history.
This meeting was devoted to a celebration African American History month. Before Professor Blight’s talk, Professor Brian Torff of Fairfield University will direct the singing of “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”
“Writing the Life of Frederick Douglass: Lessons for Our Own Political Times” was presented by David W. Blight, Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. In 2013-14 he was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University, UK, and in 2010-11, Blight was the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th century American History at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. During the 2006-07 academic year he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. He is currently writing a new, full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published by Simon and Schuster.
Click here for minutes of Meeting 1456.
This meeting was free and open to the public. The meeting began at 5 p.m. with a reception.