He was an undergraduate at Michigan State University and did his Ph. At the beginning of his career he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. His lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era at Yale is on the internet at Blight has always been a teacher first. Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other journals. In October of 2018, Simon and Schuster published his new biography of Frederick Douglass, entitled, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. The book received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History, the 2019 Bancroft Prize for History, and the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, among other awards. Blight is the author and editor of many books, including Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (1989) Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which garnered eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Merle Curti Award, the Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation (2008). Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University.

David w blight