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Frederick Douglass
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As a young boy, Douglass experienced the horrors of life under slavery in the United States. At age seven, Douglass was sent to Baltimore to live in the house of his new master, Hugh Auld, where he learned to read. The knowledge gained through reading nurtured both a dream of freedom and a keen feeling of despair at the difficulty of escape. In September 1838, Douglass disguised himself as a free seaman and then traveled to New York City. Though free, Douglass remained a fugitive under the law until friends purchased his liberty. |
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Dr. David Blight's Lecture about
Frederick Douglass (March 10, 2006)
Dr. Blight's Lecture - January 23, 2004
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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".
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