David W. Blight

David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Born in 1949 in Flint, Michigan, he received his B.A. from Flint Community College, his M.A. from Western Michigan University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom (2018) is the most comprehensive biography of the great abolitionist ever written, drawing on thousands of previously unexamined letters, newspaper articles, and documents. It won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History, the Bancroft Prize, and the Parkman Prize. Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011). He is one of America's foremost historians of the Civil War era, slavery, and memory.