About this item

A comprehensive look at how slavery and resistance to it have shaped Yale University Award-winning historian David W. Blight, with the Yale and Slavery Research Project, answers the call to investigate Yale University's historical involvement with slavery, the slave trade, and abolition. This narrative history demonstrates the importance of slavery in the making of this renowned American institution of higher learning. Drawing on wide-ranging archival materials, Yale and Slavery extends from the century before the college's founding in 1701 to the dedication of its Civil War memorial in 1915, while engaging with the legacies and remembrance of this complex story. The book brings into focus the enslaved and free Black people who have been part of Yale's history from the beginning - but too often ignored in official accounts.



About the Author

David W. Blight

David W. Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including ; and ; and annotated editions of Douglass's first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others.



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