David W. Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize winning historian and Yale Professor, spoke about “How the Aftermath of the Civil War Helps Us Understand Trumpism” in the first talk of a three-part Series sponsored by Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford. No historical event has left as deep an imprint on America’s collective memory as the Civil War. In the war’s aftermath, Americans had to embrace and cast off a traumatic past. Blight’s 2001 book “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory” explores the perilous path of remembering and forgetting, and reveals its tragic costs to race relations and America’s national reunion.
David W. Blight is Sterling 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 author of many books including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and Race and Reunion, which received the Bancroft Prize and Frederick Douglass Prize, among other awards.
This virtual talk was the first of a three-part series sponsored by Witness to History: Slavery in Guilford.