Bøger af David W. Blight

"An acclaimed historian's definitive biography of the most important African-American figure of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass, who was to his century what Martin Luther King, Jr. was to the 20th century"--

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University

""Hope is the First Great Blessing"": Leaves from the African Free School Presentation Book 1812-1826 reproduces in facsimile over 50 drawings, calligraphic exercises, essays and poems produced by African American children in New York City for presentation to sponsors and friends of their school in lower Manhattan. Introduced by scholars David Blight and James Oliver Horton, with an explanatory essay and illuminating captions by Anna Mae Duane of the University of Connecticut and Thomas Thurston, both affiliated with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at Yale, Hope is the First Great Blessing illustrates the achievements of these gifted children as they mastered the skills that would enable them to become effective citizens and leaders in a racially divided nation.

No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America's collective memory as the Civil War. In the war's aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. David Blight explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America's national reunion.

In this sensitive intellectual biography David 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.

This work explores how the contested memory of the Civil War has shaped American race relations. It demonstrates several ways to probe the history of memory, to understand how and why groups of Americans have constructed versions of the past in the service of contemporary social needs.

David Blight takes his readers back to the Civil War's centennial celebration to determine how Americans made sense of the suffering, loss, and liberation a century earlier. He shows how four of America's most incisive writers-Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin-explored the gulf between remembrance and reality.