David W. Blight

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University “The most mature examination ever made of the role of slavery in a university’s past.”—John Samuel Harpham, Times Literary Supplement 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.

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University “The most mature examination ever made of the role of slavery in a university’s past.”—John Samuel Harpham, Times Literary Supplement 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.

The earliest known prison memoir by an African American writer--recently discovered and authenticated by a team of Yale scholars--sheds light on the longstanding connection between race and incarceration in America." A] harrowing portrait] of life behind bars . . . part confession, part jeremiad, part lamentation, part picaresque novel (reminiscent, at times, of Dickens and Defoe)."--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE In 2009, scholars at Yale University came across a startling manuscript: the memoir of Austin Reed, a free black man born in the 1820s who spent most of his early life ricocheting between forced labor in prison and forced labor as an indentured servant. Lost for more than one hundred and fifty years, the handwritten document is the first known prison memoir written by an African American. Corroborated by prison records and other documentary sources, Reed's text gives a gripping first-person account of an antebellum Northern life lived outside slavery that nonetheless bore, in its day-to-day details, unsettling resemblances to that very institution. Now, for the first time, we can hear Austin Reed's story as he meant to tell it. He was born to a middle-class black family in the boomtown of Rochester, New York, but when his father died, his mother struggled to make ends meet. Still a child, Reed was placed as an indentured servant to a nearby family of white farmers near Rochester. He was caught attempting to set fire to a building and sentenced to ten years at Manhattan's brutal House of Refuge, an early juvenile reformatory that would soon become known for beatings and forced labor. Seven years later, Reed found himself at New York's infamous Auburn State Prison. It was there that he finished writing this memoir, which explores America's first reformatory and first industrial prison from an inmate's point of view, recalling the great cruelties and kindnesses he experienced in those places and excavating patterns of racial segregation, exploitation, and bondage that extended beyond the boundaries of the slaveholding South, into free New York. Accompanied by fascinating historical documents (including a series of poignant letters written by Reed near the end of his life), The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict is a work of uncommon beauty that tells a story of nineteenth-century racism, violence, labor, and captivity in a proud, defiant voice. Reed's memoir illuminates his own life and times--as well as ours today. Praise for The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict "One of the most fascinating and important memoirs ever produced in the United States."--Annette Gordon-Reed, The Washington Post "Remarkable . . . triumphantly defiant . . . The book's greatest value lies in the gap it fills."--O: The Oprah Magazine "Reed displays virtuosic gifts for narrative that, a century and a half later, earn and hold the reader's ear."--Thomas Chatterton Williams, San Francisco Chronicle " The book's] urgency and relevance remain undiminished. . . . This exemplary edition recovers history without permanently trapping it in one interpretation."--The Guardian "A sensational, novelistic telling of an eventful life."--The Paris Review"Vivid and painful."--NPR "Lyrical and graceful in one sentence, burning with fury and hellfire in the next."--Columbus Free Press

2008

Think history is dull? No way -- and you're about to find out for yourself. Kamensky/Bailey/Sheriff/Chudacoff/Logevall/Blight's A PEOPLE AND A NATION: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 12 Edition, offers a lively narrative, telling the stories of the diverse peoples in the United States. The authors bring history to life by encouraging you to imagine what life was really like in the past. Focus questions and key terms (with definitions, of course) help you concentrate on important information and easily review it as you prep for tests. With MindTap for this text, you get convenient digital access to an eBook with note-taking and other time-saving features and apps. You'll also explore the people, events and places in the United States through interactive activities, videos, images and maps. Enjoy your journey.

Think history is dull? No way, and you're about to find out for yourself. Kamensky/Bailey/Sheriff/Chudacoff/Logevall/Blight's A PEOPLE AND A NATION, VOLUME II: SINCE 1965, 12th Edition, offers a lively narrative, telling the stories of the diverse people in the United States. The authors bring history to life by encouraging you to imagine what life was really like in the past. Focus questions and key terms (with definitions, of course) help you concentrate on important information and easily review it as you prep for tests. With MindTap for this text, you get convenient digital access to an eBook with note-taking and other time-saving features and apps. You'll also explore the people, events and places in the United States through interactive activities, videos, images and maps. Enjoy your journey.

Think history is dull? No way, and you're about to find out for yourself. Kamensky/Bailey/Sheriff/Chudacoff/Logevall/Blight's A PEOPLE AND A NATION, VOLUME I: to 1877, 12th Edition, offers a lively narrative, telling the stories of the diverse people in the United States. The authors bring history to life by encouraging you to imagine what life was really like in the past. Focus questions and key terms (with definitions, of course) help you concentrate on important information and easily review it as you prep for tests. With MindTap for this text, you get convenient digital access to an eBook with note-taking and other time-saving features and apps. You'll also explore the people, events and places in the United States through interactive activities, videos, images and maps. Enjoy your journey.

For the first time in a deluxe collector's boxed set, the definitive edition of the writings of the great African American freedom fighter, including all 3 of his classic memoirs and the best of his impassioned speeches and journalism For more than five decades, from the antebellum period through the Civil War and Reconstruction and into the Gilded Age, Frederick Douglass used his voice and wielded his pen in support of abolition and emancipation, equal rights, and human dignity, developing a prophetic style suffused with scriptural cadences and a fierce moral urgency. This deluxe boxed set gathers both volumes of the Library of America's definitive edition of his collected writings. Autobiographies, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., presents all 3 of Douglass's landmark memoirs: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), a powerfully compressed account of the cruelty and oppression of the Maryland plantation culture into which Douglass was born and of his escape to freedomMy Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in which Douglass expands the account of his slave years with astonishing psychological penetration Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, first published in 1881 and revised in 1893, recounting Douglass's efforts to keep alive the struggle for racial equality in the years following the Civil War. Speeches & Writings, edited by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer David W. Blight, is the largest single-volume edition of Douglass's writings ever published, presenting 34 speeches and 67 pieces of journalism, among them such classic works as: "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?," Douglass's incandescent skewering of the slaveholding republic"There Was a Right Side in the Late War," a scathing rebuke of the push to rewrite the history of the Civil WarThe still timely "Lessons of the Hour," about lyncing and the emergence of Jim CrowIt includes as a special feature the 1853 novella "The Heroic Slave," Douglass's lone work of fictionThis collector's boxed set is the ultimate introduction to a figure whose historical significance continues to grow.

Final Resting Places brings together some of the most important and innovative scholars of the Civil War era to reflect on what death and memorialization meant to the Civil War generation—and how those meanings still influence Americans today. In each essay, a noted historian explores a different type of gravesite—including large marble temples, unmarked graves beneath the waves, makeshift markers on battlefields, mass graves on hillsides, neat rows of military headstones, university graveyards, tombs without bodies, and small family plots. Each burial place tells a unique story of how someone lived and died; how they were mourned and remembered. Together, they help us reckon with the most tragic period of American history. CONTRUBUTORS: Terry Alford, Melodie Andrews, Edward L. Ayers, DeAnne Blanton, Michael Burlingame, Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, John M. Coski, William C. Davis, Douglas R. Egerton, Stephen D. Engle, Barbara Gannon, Michael P. Gray, Hilary Green, Allen C. Guelzo, Anna Gibson Holloway, Vitor Izecksohn, Caroline E. Janney, Michelle A. Krowl, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Jennifer M. Murray, Barton A. Myers, Timothy J. Orr, Christopher Phillips, Mark S. Schantz, Dana B. Shoaf, Walter Stahr, Michael Vorenberg, and Ronald C. White

Final Resting Places brings together some of the most important and innovative scholars of the Civil War era to reflect on what death and memorialization meant to the Civil War generation—and how those meanings still influence Americans today. In each essay, a noted historian explores a different type of gravesite—including large marble temples, unmarked graves beneath the waves, makeshift markers on battlefields, mass graves on hillsides, neat rows of military headstones, university graveyards, tombs without bodies, and small family plots. Each burial place tells a unique story of how someone lived and died; how they were mourned and remembered. Together, they help us reckon with the most tragic period of American history. CONTRUBUTORS: Terry Alford, Melodie Andrews, Edward L. Ayers, DeAnne Blanton, Michael Burlingame, Katherine Reynolds Chaddock, John M. Coski, William C. Davis, Douglas R. Egerton, Stephen D. Engle, Barbara Gannon, Michael P. Gray, Hilary Green, Allen C. Guelzo, Anna Gibson Holloway, Vitor Izecksohn, Caroline E. Janney, Michelle A. Krowl, Glenn W. LaFantasie, Jennifer M. Murray, Barton A. Myers, Timothy J. Orr, Christopher Phillips, Mark S. Schantz, Dana B. Shoaf, Walter Stahr, Michael Vorenberg, and Ronald C. White

Follow history with a spirited narrative that tells the captivating stories of all people in the United States in Norton's best-selling A PEOPLE AND A NATION: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, BRIEF EDITION, 11E. Written by award-winning historians and acclaimed authors, this revised edition clearly depicts historic change -- from race, gender, economics and public policy to family life, popular culture, social movements, international relations and warfare. The first book to focus on U. S. social history, this edition now emphasizes the place of the U. S. in international history and the world. Streamlined chapters, new learning features and more than 90 maps support learning, while a new digital version and optional MindTap and Infuse digital resources help you envision what life was like in the past. This edition is available as a complete edition or split editions: VOLUME I: TO 1877 (Chs. 1–14), and VOLUME II: SINCE 1865 (Chs. 14–29).

Follow history with a spirited narrative that tells the captivating stories of all people in the United States in Norton's best-selling A PEOPLE AND A NATION: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, BRIEF EDITION, 11E. Written by award-winning historians and acclaimed authors, this revised edition clearly depicts historic change -- from race, gender, economics and public policy to family life, popular culture, social movements, international relations and warfare. The first book to focus on U. S. social history, this edition now emphasizes the place of the U. S. in international history and the world. Streamlined chapters, new learning features and more than 90 maps support learning, while a new digital version and optional MindTap and Infuse digital resources help you envision what life was like in the past. This edition is available as a complete edition or split editions: VOLUME I: TO 1877 (Chs. 1–14), and VOLUME II: SINCE 1865 (Chs. 14–29).

Follow history with a spirited narrative that tells the captivating stories of all people in the United States in Norton's best-selling A PEOPLE AND A NATION: A HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, BRIEF EDITION, 11E. Written by award-winning historians and acclaimed authors, this revised edition clearly depicts historic change -- from race, gender, economics and public policy to family life, popular culture, social movements, international relations and warfare. The first book to focus on U. S. social history, this edition now emphasizes the place of the U. S. in international history and the world. Streamlined chapters, new learning features and more than 90 maps support learning, while a new digital version and optional MindTap and Infuse digital resources help you envision what life was like in the past. This edition is available as a complete edition or split editions: VOLUME I: TO 1877 (Chs. 1–14), and VOLUME II: SINCE 1865 (Chs. 14–29).

In 1850 seven South Carolina slaves were photographed at the request of the famous naturalist Louis Agassiz to provide evidence of the supposed biological inferiority of Africans. Lost for many years, the photographs were rediscovered in the attic of Harvard’s Peabody Museum in 1976. In the first narrative history of these images, Molly Rogers tells the story of the photographs, the people they depict, and the men who made and used them. Weaving together the histories of race, science, and photography in nineteenth-century America, Rogers explores the invention and uses of photography, the scientific theories the images were intended to support and how these related to the race politics of the time, the meanings that may have been found in the photographs, and the possible reasons why they were “lost” for a century or more. Each image is accompanied by a brief fictional vignette about the subject’s life as imagined by Rogers; these portraits bring the seven subjects to life, adding a fascinating human dimension to the historical material.

* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History * “Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African American of the 19th century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. 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.

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History** “Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era. 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.

"No one working on Douglass should leave home without a copy of this book."—from the foreword by David W. Blight, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of FreedomDrawing on previously untapped sources, Young Frederick Douglass recreates with fidelity and in convincing detail the background and early life of the man who was to become “the gadfly of America’s conscience” and the undisputed spokesman for nineteenth-century black Americans. With a new foreword by renowned Douglass scholar David W. Blight, Dickson J. Preston’s highly regarded biography traces the life and times of Frederick Douglass from his birth on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1818 until 1838, when he escaped from slavery to emerge upon the national scene. Astounding his white contemporaries with his oratorical brilliance and intellectual capabilities, Douglass dared to challenge the doctrine of white supremacy on its own grounds. At the time of Douglass’s death in 1895, one eulogist wrote that he was probably the best-known American throughout the world since Abraham Lincoln.

Think history is dull? No way, and you're about to find out for yourself. A PEOPLE AND A NATION offers a lively narrative, telling the stories of the diverse peoples in the United States. The authors bring history to life by encouraging you to imagine what life was really like in the past. Focus questions and key terms (with definitions, of course) help you concentrate on important information and easily review it as you prep for tests. And with MindTap for A People and a Nation, you get convenient digital access to an ebook with note-taking and other time-saving features and apps. You'll also explore the people, events and places in the United States through interactive activities, videos, images and maps. Enjoy your journey.

Think history is dull? No way, and you're about to find out for yourself. A PEOPLE AND A NATION offers a lively narrative, telling the stories of the diverse peoples in the United States. The authors bring history to life by encouraging you to imagine what life was really like in the past. Focus questions and key terms (with definitions, of course) help you concentrate on important information and easily review it as you prep for tests. And with MindTap for A People and a Nation, you get convenient digital access to an ebook with note-taking and other time-saving features and apps. You'll also explore the people, events and places in the United States through interactive activities, videos, images and maps. Enjoy your journey.