IMPORTANT NEW BOOK:

Yale and Slavery: A History
by David W. Blight
Yale University Press, 2024

[Publication date: February 16, 2024]

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University
 
Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University’s historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning.
 
Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college’s founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale’s history from the beginning—but too often ignored in official accounts. These individuals and their descendants worked at Yale; petitioned and fought for freedom and dignity; built churches, schools, and antislavery organizations; and were among the first Black students to transform the university from the inside.
 
Always alive to the surprises and ironies of the past, Yale and Slavery presents a richer and more complete history of Yale, the third-oldest college in the country, showing how pillars of American higher education, even in New England, emerged over time intertwined with the national and international history of racial slavery.

REVIEW:

“Exhaustively researched, lyrically written, and fearlessly honest, Blight’s book represents not only a worthy capstone to the efforts of the Yale and Slavery Working Group, but also the culmination of a generation of scholarly inquiry into the tangled relationship of universities and slavery.”—James T. Campbell, Stanford University

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David W. Blight is professor of American history and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the critically acclaimed author of eight books, including his magisterial magnum opus Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster (2018) which won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2019.

 

Works

Books as author

 

• David W. Blight (1989). Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. LSU Press. ISBN 978-0-8071-1724-8.
• David W. Blight (2001). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-00819-9.
• David W. Blight (2002). Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. University of Massachusetts Press. ISBN 978-1-55849-361-2.
• David W. Blight (2007). A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 978-0-15-101232-9.
• David W. Blight (2011). American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era. Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0-67-404855-3.
• David W. Blight (2018). Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 978-1-4165-9031-6.
• David W. Blight (2024). Yale and Slavery: A History. Yale University Press. ISBN 9780300273847.

 

Books as contributor

 

• Frederick Douglass (1993). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Introduction David W. Blight. Bedford Books of St. Martin's Press.
• "The Theft of Lincoln in Scholarship, Politics, and Public Memory". Eric Foner, ed. (2008). Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-06756-9.
• "Introduction" (co-authored with Gregory P. Downs and Jim Downs). David W. Blight and Jim Downs, eds. (2017). Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. University of Georgia Press. 2017. ISBN 9780820351483.
• "Composite Nation?", Joshua Claybourn, ed. (2019). Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative. Potomac Books. ISBN 978-1640121706.
• "Foreword: From Every Point of the Compass out of the Countless Graves". Brian Matthew Jordan; Jonathan W. White, eds. (2023). Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves. The University of Georgia Press. ISBN 9780820364551.

Awards

• 2001 Frederick Douglass Prize for Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.^[11]
• 2002 Bancroft Prize; co-winner, James A. Rawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians; 2002 Ellis W. Hawley Prize, Organization of American Historians; Merle Curti Award; and Lincoln Prize for Race and Reunion^[11]
• 2008 Connecticut Book Prize for A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
• 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Prize for American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era^[12]
• 2018 Vincent J. Dooley Distinguished Teaching Fellow, honor bestowed by the Georgia Historical Society.
• 2018 The Lincoln Forum's Richard Nelson Current Award of Achievement^[13]
• 2019 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
• 2019 New England Book Awards for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom^[14]
• 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
• 2019 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award for Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
• 2020 American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal in History^[15]
• 2022 American Academy of Achievement's Golden Plate Award^[16]