\nDavid W. Blight is a teacher\, scholar\, \;and public historian. At Yale University he is Class of 1954 Professor of American History\, joining that faculty in January 2003. As of June 2004\, he is Director\, succeeding David Brion Davis\, of the \;Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery\, Resistance\, and Abolition. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale\, Blight organizes conferences\, working groups\, lectures\, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize\, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition.
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A NEW YORK TIMES\, WALL STREET JOURNAL\, and TIME MAGAZINE TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR
\n\nBlight&rsquo\;s newest book\, \; \;Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom\, is a \;definitive\, dramatic biography of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century. \;In this remarkable biography\, David Blight has drawn on new information held in a private collection that few other historians have consulted\, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass&rsquo\;s newspapers. Blight tells the fascinating story of Douglass&rsquo\; two marriages and his complex extended family. Douglass was not only an astonishing man of words\, but a thinker steeped in Biblical story and theology. There has not been a major biography of Douglass in a quarter century. David Blight&rsquo\;s \;Frederick Douglass \;affords this important American the distinguished biography he deserves.
\n\nThank you to John and Francie Pepper for sponsoring the Freedom Lecture Series and to our print media sponsor\, \;Cincy Magazine.
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