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IHS Speaker Explores Race
and Religion’s Role in the Civil
War
The Indiana Historical Society
will continue its History Makers: IHS Distinguished
Speakers Series as it welcomes noted author and
historian David Blight at 7 p.m. on November 29,
2007. The presentation will take place in the Frank and
Katrina Basile Theater of the Indiana History Center,
located at 450 W. Ohio St. in downtown
Indianapolis.
Blight, director of the Gilder
Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and
Abolition at Yale University, uses his research and writing to
present a new way of understanding the nation’s
collective response to the war. He argues that, in the
interest of reunification, the country ignored the
racist underpinnings of the war, leaving a legacy of
racial conflict.
Blight is the author of
Race and Reunion: The Civil War
in American Memory(Harvard
University Press), for which he won numerous
awards, including the 2001 Frederick Douglass Book Prize
and the 2002 Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes. He was
recently a featured historian on The History Channel’s
series Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed
America and just released his newest book, A Slave No More: Two Men Who
Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of
Emancipation (Harcourt
Press).
“I came of age in college in the
late 1960s and early 1970s when race and the ‘Second
Reconstruction’ in America (the civil rights movement),”
said Blight. “To be a teacher of American history and
hoping to be a historian, I had to ask the questions of
my time –
about slavery, race and the
meaning of the Civil War.
“I spent the first seven years
of my career as a high school teacher in Flint, Mich.,
and it is there that I became forever interested in the
story of race and slavery in America. In recent years I
have turned my interests to the historical memory of the
Civil War in American culture.”
Cost to attend is $25 per person
for the general public and $20 per person for IHS
members. For more information on this and other programs
and events of the Indiana Historical Society, call (317)
232-1882 or (800) 447-1830. Information is also
available at www.indianahistory.org.
Since 1830, the Indiana
Historical Society has been Indiana’s Storyteller™,
connecting people to the past by collecting, preserving,
interpreting, and disseminating the state's history. A
nonprofit membership organization, the IHS also
publishes books and periodicals; sponsors teacher
workshops; provides youth, adult, and family
programming; provides support and assistance to local
museums and historical groups; and maintains the
nation's premier research library and archives on the
history of Indiana and the Old
Northwest.
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