Yale University historian David W. Blight, author of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, will offer a free public lecture at Gustavus Adolphus College on Monday, April 11 at 7 p.m. in Cec Eckhoff Alumni Hall in the Johnson Student Union.
Blight’s lecture, “The Legacies of Frederick Douglass in our Own Time,” will discuss the lasting impact of Frederick Douglass’ life and work, and how elements of his story inform the arc of Black American history and continuing societal conversations about civil and equal rights.
Blight is 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. He 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.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For those who cannot attend in person, the lecture will be streamed live online here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjG4UIqRrrw.
Following the lecture, members of the audience will have the opportunity to ask Blight questions. A book signing will be offered after the lecture and q-and-a.