Lecture-Concert Series presents Civil War authority Dr. David W. Blight

Oct. 8, 2007 -- Civil War authority Dr. David W. Blight will be the featured speaker in the fourth event of Arkansas State University's 2007-2008 Lecture-Concert Series. Blight will present a lecture, "A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom," on Thursday, Oct. 25, at 7 p.m. in the Reng Student Services Center/Student Union Auditorium.

Blight, a professor of history at Yale University and director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, is one of the nation's foremost authorities on the U.S. Civil War and its legacy.

Dr. Blight's presentation in ASU's Lecture-Concert Series is funded in part by Drs. Rosalee and Raymond Weiss of Teaneck, N. J., in memory of Rosalee Weiss's mother, Corinne Sternheimer Greenfield, through an endowment supporting annual lectures (the Corinne Sternheimer Greenfield Lecture Series) in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at ASU.

Blight's book, "Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory," earned a number of awards, including the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, three awards from the Organization of American Historians, and  the Bancroft Prize. It presents 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.

His most recent book is entitled "A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation." He is currently on leave as a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

He is now completing a book, "Seizing Freedom: The Civil War and Emancipation of Wallace Turnage and John Washington." He earned his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and he has taught at Harvard, North Central College in Naperville, Ill., and Yale. He has taught courses including seminars in nineteenth-century U.S. History, African-American history, and historical memory.

For more details, contact Dr. Gil Fowler, associate dean for the Honors College, at (870) 972-2308 or via e-mail at gfowler@astate.edu, or visit http://honors.astate.edu. The Lecture-Concert Series presents diverse programs to enrich the cultural life of the campus, community, and region.

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