Fortenbaugh Lecture

David Blight

Sterling Professor of History and Black Studies

Yale University

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. In 2020, Yale President Peter Salovey appointed him as chair of the Yale and Slavery Working Group. With his Working Group colleagues, Blight authored the book Yale and Slavery: A History, a narrative study of Yale’s historic involvement and associations with slavery and its aftermaths, published by Yale University Press in February of 2024. He is the immediate past president of the Organization of American Historians (2024-2025). Blight previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University, and Amherst College. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other journals. In 2020 David Blight was elected to the American Philosophical Society and awarded the Gold Medal for History by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His lecture course on the Civil War and Reconstruction Era at Yale is on the internet at https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-119 Blight has always been a teacher first. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. Blight maintains a website, including information about public lectures, books, articles, and interviews at: http://www.davidwblight.com/

Drew Gilpin Faust

Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor Emerita

Harvard University

Drew Gilpin Faust is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard University where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. She came to Harvard in 2001 as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after twenty five years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Faust is the author of seven books, including Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, published in August 2023. Her earlier book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, was awarded the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was recognized by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2008. She and her husband live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Stephanie McCurry

R. Gordon Professor of American History

Columbia University

Stephanie McCurry teaches at Columbia University where she is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History.  She is the author of three books including Confederate Reckoning:  Power and Politics in the Civil War South which won multiple book prizes and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, The TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Irish Times.  In 2023-2024 she was a fellow at the Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library.  Stephanie is currently working on a book which is under contract with Simon and Schuster.  The book is a new history of Reconstruction in the United States that identifies the intimate as a domain of power that reframes the scale and challenge of the era.

Jim Downs

Gilder Lehrman NEH Chair of Civil War Era Studies and History

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE

Scott Hancock

Associate Professor History

GETTYSBURG COLLEGE