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Blight is the author or editor of a dozen books, including American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory and annotated editions of Frederick Douglass’s first two autobiographies. Books are available for sale and signing courtesy of Smithsonian Enterprises. By the Civil War and during Reconstruction, Douglass became the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. Robinson Professor of History, George Mason University and curator of the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s inaugural exhibition entitled Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation 1876-1968. Related Exhibition: Slavery and Freedom Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: Jim Crow and the Era of Segregation 1876-1968.ĭavid Blight, director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University, will talk about his new book, Frederick Douglass Prophet of Freedom in a discussion moderated by Spencer Crew, the Clarence J. For this biography, the first major work on Douglass in nearly 25 years, Blight drew on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted and recently discovered issues of Douglass's newspapers.Venue: African American History and Culture MuseumĮvent Location: Concourse, Oprah Winfrey Theater

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. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s entire life, from a plantation in Maryland, to his escape and education, his two marriages and complex extended family. In this sensitive intellectual biography David W. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery. As a young man, Douglass 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. This lecture is based on David Blight's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography 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.