David W. Blight

Blight grew up in Flint, Michigan, where he taught in a public high school for seven years. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in-Madison in 1985, and is currently the director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. His primary focus in on the American Civil War and its aftermath. He has written several books including Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001) and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (2007). Along with Eric Foner and Steven Hahn he focuses his writing on Reconstruction history. Blight has been awarded a Bancroft Prize, a Lincoln Prize, and a Frederick Douglass Prize. Blight also wrote an introduction for "A Narrative In The Life of Frederick Douglass".