Race and Reunion

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. Blight was the Class of 1959 Professor of History at Amherst College, where he taught for 13 years. He has won major... historical awards, including the Bancroft Prize and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Blight grew up in Flint, Michigan. After getting his undergraduate degree, Blight taught in a public high school for seven years. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1985. After teaching at Harvard and North Central College, he taught at Amherst College from 1990 to 2003. In 2001 he published Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. It received numerous major historical awards, as it "presented a new way of understanding the nation's collective response to the war, arguing that, in the interest of reunification, the country ignored the racist underpinnings of the war, leaving a legacy of racial conflict." It has been a seminal work in the enlarging field of memory studies.
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