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Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

As a young man Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.

Initially mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass spoke widely, using his own story to condemn slavery. By the Civil War, Douglass had become the most famed and widely travelled orator in the nation. In his unique and eloquent voice, written and spoken, Douglass was a fierce critic of the United States as well as a radical patriot. After the war he sometimes argued politically with younger African Americans, but he never forsook either the Republican party or the cause of black civil and political rights.

In this “cinematic and deeply engaging” (The New York Times Book Review) biography, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historian have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers. “Absorbing and even moving…a brilliant book that speaks to our own time as well as Douglass’s” (The Wall Street Journal), Blight’s biography tells the fascinating story of Douglass’s two marriages and his complex extended family. “David Blight has written the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass…a powerful portrait of one of the most important American voices of the nineteenth century” (The Boston Globe).

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Frederick Douglass won the Bancroft, Parkman, Los Angeles Times (biography), Lincoln, Plutarch, and Christopher awards and was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Time.

Tickets to Blight’s discussion with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham at noon at the Kentucky Book Festival are available here!

About the Author

David W. Blight is a teacher, scholar and award-winning public historian. He is Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

Blight’s most recent book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, won nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

As director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. In 2013-14 he was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University. Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as an advisor to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. In 2012, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (2013), Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, (2014), American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011) and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (2007). Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history.

Blight has written many academic and public articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He lectures widely in the US and around the world on the Civil War and Reconstruction, race relations, Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002, and served as the Society’s President in 2013-14.

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