Renowned Historian David Blight Speaks at Nightingale

Dr. David Blight, one of the foremost historians in the country and a renowned expert on abolition and the Civil War, spoke to Upper School students at Nightingale on February 17. On the heels of his latest book—American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, 2011)—Dr. Blight led students and faculty through a meditation on the meaning of history, shared memory, and the legacy of the Civil War. Beginning with a discussion of Robert Penn Warren’s The Legacy of the Civil War (1961), which commemorated the centennial of the start of the Civil War, Dr. Blight asked a series of questions about the meaning of memory: why does it matter what happened yesterday, last year, or 100 years ago? How do we value memory, both individually and collectively? Should history be a warm blanket for us, or should its lessons keep us awake at night?

The 1961 centennial of the Civil War provided the basis for Dr. Blight’s talk, as it both corresponded with and was, to a great extent, kept separate from the civil rights movement. Yet many of the civil rights leaders, he reminded the audience, used the Civil War as a backdrop to their call to action: the vast majority of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream…” speech was actually a stirring reflection on the progress of our country 100 years after the Civil War. (The “I have a dream” refrain accounts only for the final minutes of the speech.) And James Baldwin, famed American author of The Fire Next Door and one of the leading voices of the civil rights movement, wrote passionately about our past influencing us: “history,” he said, “is present in all that we do.” (At one point, Dr. Blight paraphrased a response that Mr. Baldwin gave in an interview with Studs Terkel. Mr. Terkel asked, in a discussion about the Freedom Riders and other civil rights fighters, “What’s gotten into them?” Mr. Baldwin replied, “It’s not that anything’s gotten into them. It’s that their history is coming out of them.”)

Dr. Blight closed his talk with a final thought on why history might be valuable to us—what it provides us as individuals and a people. Especially during times of struggle and despair, he said, having a sense of history “means knowing you’re not alone.”

Dr. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. His book Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001) received seven book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, the Frederick Douglass Prize, and four awards from the Organization of American Historians. Dr. Blight has a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has also taught at Harvard University and North Central College, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. His talk at Nightingale was part of an ongoing partnership between Nightingale-Bamford and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. In addition to annual lectures by visiting historians, the partnership allows Nightingale faculty and students study and intern at Gilder Lehrman each year.