The Legacies of Frederick Douglass in Our Own Time
Channel: Gustavus Adolphus College
Date: 2022-04-11

A public talk by Yale University historian David W. Blight, author of the magnificent 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.  A distinguished historian of the Civil War and the leading scholar of Douglass, an escaped slave who authored the greatest American slave narrative and became the most important Black leader in the nineteenth-century United States, Blight is the Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale.  His talk inaugurates a new lecture series made possible by and in honor of his friend and fellow Pulitzer-winning Civil War historian, Gustavus alum James M. McPherson, Class of 1958, the George Henry Davis '86 Professor Emeritus of United States History at Princeton University.  A Q&A with the audience and book signing will follow Professor Blight's talk.