Their Generation
David W. Blight
At a time when politicians are openly attacking the study of history, “Their Generation” goes back to the scholars who fundamentally transformed the field after the 1960s and, in doing so, changed how Americans understand themselves. These historians shattered narrow canons, introduced ignored voices to the center of the story, and confronted myths of a national history devoid of conflict and struggle. This ongoing series, available exclusively to paid subscribers of The Long View in my Friday newsletter, lets them speak for themselves, at a moment when historical truth is once again under threat.
David W. Blight is a teacher, scholar, and public historian. At Yale University, he is Sterling Professor of History. Blight has been the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and also served as president of the Organization of American Historians.
Blight’s book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, received the Bancroft Prize, the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. Another of Blight’s books, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, garnered nine book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, the Bancroft Prize, and the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.
Other published works include Yale and Slavery: A History and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War. Blight is also the editor of, and author of introductions to, When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (co-edited with Robert Gooding-Williams); W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (co-edited with Brooks Simpson); and The Columbian Orator by Caleb Bingham, the collection of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered in his youth.
Blight is the editor of and author of introductions for six other books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster ; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, co-editor with Robert Gooding-Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk; co-editor with Brooks Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era; and Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator, the book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth. The edited volume, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, served as the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.
Blight’s work also includes annotated editions, with an introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era, which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity.
For more on David W. Blight’s work, see
https://www.davidwblight.com/
My Interview with David Blight
How did activism shape how you do or teach history?
I was in college from 1967 to 1971 at Michigan State University. So I came of age with the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement. Leaving high school in 1967 in Flint, Michigan, where I grew up, and all through college I lived with the changing nature and the reality of the “Selective Service” system, or the draft. I was not in any way an activist until my second and especially third year in college, 1969-70. In every way the questions I pursued about American history and history generally (I loved ancient and Russian history as well) developed through those two extended crises in the United States.
In Flint I grew up thoroughly working class in values and in economic condition. We lived almost my entire youth in a trailer park approximately a half mile from the huge AC Spark Plug Division of General Motors, where my father, a four and a half year veteran of World War II, worked. He first worked on a factory production line and then with time, without any college education, managed to get a “white collar” job sitting at a desk and ordering parts. The white collar was not a metaphor for him, as he often reminded his two sons. The only person I ever knew through high school who had a Ph. D. was the principal of my school, and it was earned in education. He was a bit of snooty sort; his name was John Kouzoujian, he used pretentious big words and insisted on being called “Dr. Louzoujian.”
At MSU my mind and spirit flowered when I formally left the varsity baseball team in winter, 1970. That spring, with the Moratorium against the war, many protest marches, and the killings at Kent State I gained a political consciousness as never before. And in the larger world of race and civil rights, I had just gained a politics because of urban riots from 1965 into the 1970s, especially the huge rebellion in Detroit in 1967. In 1969 or 70 I took the first ever Black American history course; the professor was Leslie Rout, an African American whose field was Brazilian history. My high school history teachers, although I admired both of them, had taught precious little Black history at all. I was a history major from day one at MSU; it was all I ever wanted to do, and I wanted most of all to become a high school teacher. In the fall of 1970, I did my student teaching in Flint; during that term the school had police patrolling the halls for weeks, and there were many disturbances and some violence. White and black parents took sides about “community control” and “Black Power.” My supervisory teacher effectively checked out of town during that term, and I was thrown into the deep end and told that all the US history classes were mine. It was a good if uneasy baptism in teaching and in the turbulence of race relations. Most of the terrible divisions and anxieties about race in American streets and homes flowed into the school and most teachers, including me, were not prepared. But it was an exciting and meaningful beginning in education.
I took my first job the following summer teaching in Flint, Michigan. I taught there for the next seven years and it became the formative time in my professional life. I loved high school teaching, but it can wear down the strongest and most dedicated of people. I threw myself into the job, physically, emotionally, and morally. While teaching full-time, I did my MA in history at MSU, one course at a time evenings and in summers over a period of three years. That experience of taking real graduate seminars and writing research papers (two of which I actually published in popular history magazines) helped me slowly understand that I desired somehow to pursue an academic life.
As a teacher I was an activist in our union and in various kinds of curriculum development, and for five years taking a bus load of working class kids from Flint to historical sites, especially about the Civil War, all over the east coast. I also served on a community council that tried to imagine new magnet schools that would help the city diversify and avoid court-ordered busing. My older brother, Jim, who went on to be a very distinguished scholar of the Cold War, especially the Cuban Missile Crisis and Vietnam, was perhaps the biggest influence I ever had. His brilliance and determination, and his conquest of “graduate school,” as well as his advice despite our background, was always in some form my model.
So In 1978 I applied to two Ph. D. programs, at the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin. Michigan turned me down and Wisconsin admitted me. So in the fall of 1978 I went to Madison with imagination and hope, and very little money. It was there in the four years I spent working for the doctorate that I found scholarly guidance and a fundamental pivot in my life. I always recalled that one of my professors at MSU while doing the MA said to me: “well, if you want to do a Ph.D. it means you want to “live a life of the mind.” I think he saw me as nervous and unfit, but with time, I wanted to somehow live his life. With my brother’s help I had reached that treacherous stage.
Who were some of your key intellectual influences?
At Wisconsin, I was blessed to come under the guidance of Richard Sewell, the historian of political abolitionism. His Ballots for Freedom is still a classic synthesis for anyone wishing to understand how the antislavery movement turned to politics in the 1840s and 50s and how that turn reshaped American political culture as well as the coming of the Civil War. Dick was a masterful mentor and a teacher of writing. His care with and sometimes brutal critique of my over-wrought prose made me a writer. And I suppose, forever, Dick molded me into a political historian, as I was also finding my feet in cultural and intellectual history in the courses of Paul Conkin, Daniel Rodgers, and Paul Boyer. All three taught me how to think about ideas; Rodgers astutely reminded us that ideas should always be somehow tied to the ground, to real people.
