David W. Blight

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History**“Extraordinary…a great American biography” ( The New Yorker ) of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” ( The New York Times Book Review ) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” ( The Wall Street Journal ), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” ( The Boston Globe ).In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Frederick Douglass won the Bancroft, Parkman , Los Angeles Times (biography), Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time.

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion. In 1865, confronted with a ravaged landscape and a torn America, the North and South began a slow and painful process of reconciliation. The ensuing decades witnessed the triumph of a culture of reunion, which downplayed sectional division and emphasized the heroics of a battle between noble men of the Blue and the Gray. Nearly lost in national culture were the moral crusades over slavery that ignited the war, the presence and participation of African Americans throughout the war, and the promise of emancipation that emerged from the war. Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial. Blight's sweeping narrative of triumph and tragedy, romance and realism, is a compelling tale of the politics of memory, of how a nation healed from civil war without justice. By the early twentieth century, the problems of race and reunion were locked in mutual dependence, a painful legacy that continues to haunt us today.

Slave narratives, some of the most powerful records of our past, are extremely rare, with only fifty-five post–Civil War narratives surviving. A mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group with the publication of A Slave No More, a major new addition to the canon of American history. Handed down through family and friends, these narratives tell gripping stories of escape: Through a combination of intelligence, daring, and sheer luck, the men reached the protection of the occupying Union troops. David W. Blight magnifies the drama and significance by prefacing the narratives with each man’s life history. Using a wealth of genealogical information, Blight has reconstructed their childhoods as sons of white slaveholders, their service as cooks and camp hands during the Civil War, and their climb to black working-class stability in the north, where they reunited their families. In the stories of Turnage and Washington, we find history at its most intimate, portals that offer a rich new answer to the question of how four million people moved from slavery to freedom. In A Slave No More, the untold stories of two ordinary men take their place at the heart of the American experience.

Standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963, a century after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “One hundred years later, the Negro still is not free.” He delivered this speech just three years after the Virginia Civil War Commission published a guide proclaiming that “the Centennial is no time for finding fault or placing blame or fighting the issues all over again.”David Blight takes his readers back to the centennial celebration to determine how Americans then made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation that had wracked the United States a century earlier. Amid cold war politics and civil rights protest, four of America’s most incisive writers explored the gulf between remembrance and reality. Robert Penn Warren, the southern-reared poet-novelist who recanted his support of segregation; Bruce Catton, the journalist and U.S. Navy officer who became a popular Civil War historian; Edmund Wilson, the century’s preeminent literary critic; and James Baldwin, the searing African-American essayist and activist—each exposed America’s triumphalist memory of the war. And each, in his own way, demanded a reckoning with the tragic consequences it spawned.Blight illuminates not only mid-twentieth-century America’s sense of itself but also the dynamic, ever-changing nature of Civil War memory. On the eve of the 150th anniversary of the war, we have an invaluable perspective on how this conflict continues to shape the country’s political debates, national identity, and sense of purpose.

During the past decade and a half, scholars have increasingly addressed the relationship of history and memory. Among American historians, David W. Blight has been a pioneer in the field of memory studies, especially on the problems of slavery, race, and the Civil War. In this collection of essays, Blight examines the meanings embedded in the causes, course, and consequences of the Civil War, the nature of changing approaches to African American history, and the significance of race in the ways Americans, North and South, black and white, developed historical memories of the nation's most divisive event.The book as a whole demonstrates several ways to probe the history of memory, to understand how and why groups of Americans have constructed versions of the past in the service of contemporary social needs. Topics range from the writing and thought of Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois to a comparison of Abraham Lincoln and Douglass on the level of language and memory. The volume also includes a compelling study of the values of a single Union soldier, an analysis of Ken Burns's PBS series The Civil War, and a retrospective treatment of the distinguished African American historian Nathan I. Huggins.Taken together, these lucidly written pieces offer a thoroughgoing assessment of the stakes of Civil War memory and their consequences for American race relations. Beyond the Battlefield demonstrates not only why we should preserve and study our Civil War battlefields, but also why we should lift our vision above those landscapes and ponder all the unfinished questions of healing and justice, of racial harmony and disharmony, that still bedevil our society and our historical imagination.

Few things have defined America as much as slavery. In the wake of emancipation the story of the Underground Railroad has become a seemingly irresistible part of American historical consciousness. This stirring drama is one Americans have needed to tell and retell and pass on to their children. But just how much of the Underground Railroad is real, how much legend and mythology, how much invention? Passages to Freedom sets out to answer this question and place it within the context of slavery, emancipation, and its aftermath. Published on the occasion of the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, Passages to Freedom brings home the reality of slavery's destructiveness. This distinguished yet accessible volume offers a galvanizing look at how the brave journey out of slavery both haunts and inspires us today.

In this sensitive intellectual biography David W. Blight undertakes the first systematic analysis of the impact of the Civil War on Frederick Douglass' life and thought, offering new insights into the meaning of the war in American history and in the Afro-American experience. Frederick Douglass' Civil War follows Douglass' intellectual and personal growth from the political crises of the 1850s through secession, war, black enlistment, emancipation, and Reconstruction. This book provides an engrossing story of Douglass' development of a social identity in relation to transforming events, and demonstrates that he saw the Civil War as the Second American Revolution, and himself as one of the founders of a new nation. Through Douglass' life, his voice, and his interpretations we see the Civil War era and its memory in a new light.

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning. Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college’s founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale’s history from the beginning—but too often ignored in official accounts. These individuals and their descendants worked at Yale; petitioned and fought for freedom and dignity; built churches, schools, and antislavery organizations; and were among the first Black students to transform the university from the inside. Always alive to the surprises and ironies of the past, Yale and Slavery presents a richer and more complete history of Yale, the third-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, emerged over time intertwined with the national and international history of racial slavery.

"I am scared most to death every battle we have, but I don't think you need be afraid of my sneaking away unhurt." Thus wrote Adjutant Charles Harvey Brewster of the 10th Massachusetts to his sister Martha in 1864, in one of over 200 letters he would pen during his four years of service.Born and raised in Northampton, Massachusetts, Brewster was a twenty-seven-year-old store clerk when he enlisted in Company C of the 10th Massachusetts Volunteers in April 1861. During the next three and a half years he fought in many of the major battles of the Virginia campaigns--Fair Oaks, the Seven Days, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, the "Bloody Angle" at Spotsylvania--rising through the ranks to become second lieutenant and later adjutant of his regiment. His letters, most of which were written to his mother and two sisters, record not only the horrors he witnessed on the battlefield, but also his inner struggle with his own values, convictions, and sense of manhood.In a thoughtful and illuminating introductory essay, David W. Blight explores the evolution of Brewster's understanding of the terrible conflict in which he was engaged. Blight shows how Brewster's attitudes toward race and slavery gradually changed, in part as a result of his contact with escaped slaves and his experience recruiting black troops. He also examines the shift in Brewster's conception of courage, as the realities of war collided with the romantic ideals he had previously embraced.This recently discovered and exceptionally literate collection of 137 letters chronicles the experiences of an ordinary Union soldier caught up in extraordinary events. At times naive and sentimental, at times mature and realistic, Brewster's correspondence not only provides remarkable insight into the meaning of the Civil War for the average Yankee, but also testifies to the persistent power of war to attract and repel the human imagination.

Developed to meet the demand for a low-cost, high-quality history book, this economically priced version of A PEOPLE AND A NATION, Ninth Edition, offers readers the complete text while limiting the number of features, photos and maps. All volumes feature a paperback, two-color format that appeals to those seeking a comprehensive, trade-sized history text. A PEOPLE AND A NATION is a best-selling text offering a spirited narrative that tells the stories of all people in the United States. The authors' attention to race and racial identity and their inclusion of everyday people and popular culture brings history to life, engaging readers and encouraging them to imagine what life was really like in the past.

David W. Blight is Class of 1959 Professor of History and Black Studies at Amherst College. Since receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1985, he has written Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001). Blight has also edited or co-edited five books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (1992); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1993), and W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1997). Blight has also written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history.

"Hope is the First Great Blessing": Leaves from the African Free School Presentation Book 1812-1826 reproduces in facsimile over 50 drawings, calligraphic exercises, essays and poems produced by African American children in New York City for presentation to sponsors and friends of their school in lower Manhattan. Introduced by scholars David Blight and James Oliver Horton, with an explanatory essay and illuminating captions by Anna Mae Duane of the University of Connecticut and Thomas Thurston, both affiliated with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at Yale, Hope is the First Great Blessing illustrates the achievements of these gifted children as they mastered the skills that would enable them to become effective citizens and leaders in a racially divided nation.

Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) was a former slave and great American abolitionist, author, and orator. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is his best-selling autobiography, written in 1845.