David W. Blight, a professor of American history at Yale and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, will present “Monuments and Memories: Has the Civil War Ever Really Ended?” on Wednesday, April 25, at 7:30 p.m. in 201 Riley Hall at Linfield College.
In August of 2017, the proposed removal of a monument honoring Confederate General Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., spurred protestors to descend upon the city. One white supremacist rammed his car into a crowd, killing one person and injuring 19.
Since then, many cities have been questioning and removing their own Confederate monuments. Critics contend that the Confederacy fought to maintain slavery and white supremacy in the United States and shouldn’t be honored or commemorated; defenders argue that these monuments are about Southern pride, and that taking down these symbols erases American history. Blight will discuss Confederate monuments, and conflicting narratives around the Civil War, in his lecture.
“I first met David Blight at his seminar on slave narratives at Yale several summers ago; he is one of America’s greatest Civil War historians,” said Peter Buckingham, professor of history at Linfield College. “His thoughts on the monument controversy, including the terrible events at Charlottesville, will be most interesting.”
Blight is a teacher, scholar and public historian. As the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. Blight is also the author of “Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham 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. Other published works include “Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War,” and Frederick Douglass’s “Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee.” He is currently writing a new, full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2018.
This event is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Jonas A. “Steine” Jonasson Endowed Lecture that honors Jonasson, professor emeritus of history, who was associated with Linfield for more than 60 years before his death in 1997. The endowment is used to bring in distinguished scholars and speakers in the area of history. Jonasson held the unofficial title of Linfield historian and wrote “Bricks Without Straw,” a history of the college.
For more information, call 503-883-2479 or email pbucking@linfield.edu.
