David W. Blight
Class of 1954 Professor of American History
Office: HGS 104, ALW 214 (GLC)
Phone: (203) 432-8521, 432-3339 (GLC)
Email: david.blight@yale.edu
David W. Blight joined the department in January 2003 as professor of history. He is one of the nation's foremost authorities on the US Civil War and its legacy. He is currently on leave as a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
His book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) earned a number of awards, including the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, three awards from the Organization of American Historians, and the Bancroft Prize. It presented a new way of understanding the nation's collective response to the war, arguing that, in the interest of reunification, the country ignored the racist underpinnings of the war, leaving a legacy of racial conflict. His newest book is entitled, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, published by Harcourt.
Professor Blight's other books include Frederick Douglas's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989) and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (2002). He has edited and co-edited five other books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (1992) and Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (1997), and he is the co-author of the U.S. history textbook, A People and a Nation. He is now completing a book, Seizing Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation of Wallace Turnage and John Washington, to be published by Harcourt in 2007.
Professor Blight comes to Yale from Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin- Madison and then taught at Harvard and at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. Before his university career, he taught for seven years in a public high school in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. His courses include seminars in nineteenth-century U.S. history, African- American history, and historical memory.
