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City Club of Cleveland - David W. Blight, Professor, Yale University

City Club of Cleveland

David Blight is a Professor of American History at Yale University. Blight's newest book, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity.

The work is an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007). This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives.

Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards; a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989).

September 14, 2012