Historian to explore life of Frederick Douglass

Press release:

Civil War historian David Blight will present a talk titled ‘”My Voice, My Pen, My Vote’: The Several Lives of Frederick Douglass” at Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Center for Graduate Studies Asheville, 36 Montford Ave. (Chamber of Commerce building), Asheville, on Saturday, Sept. 16, at 7:30 p.m.

The talk is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.

“David Blight is an unusually engaging and memorable speaker,” said David Madden, program chair for the Yale Alumni Association of Western North Carolina.

The talk is a presentation of the Association of Yale Alumni for Western North Carolina, the MLK Association of Asheville and Buncombe County, and Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Center for Graduate Studies Asheville.

Administrator of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Blight is currently finishing a new, full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published by Simon and Schuster in early 2018.

David Blight is the author of Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.

His American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin, received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in nonfiction on racism and human diversity.

Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, four awards from the Organization of American Historians, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Since 2004, David Blight has been professor of American History at Yale University. He is director of the Gilder Lehman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. In 2010-11 Blight was the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th century American History at the Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. He previously taught at Amherst College, Harvard University, and Cambridge University, UK. In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

For more information, please contact David Madden at 828-419-0730 or david@davidmadden.net.