We’ll be spending this week exploring the lives and works of the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award winners. First up is David W. Blight, 2012 winner for nonfiction, for his work, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era.
- He’s working on a biography of Frederick Douglass to be released in 2013.
- He is, as to be expected from his body of work, one of the nation’s most preeminent scholars on the Civil War. (Read his thoughts on whether the war could have been prevented.)
- His course at Yale, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845-1877, is available for free on Yale’s Open Courses website. Check it out here.
- His work has been acknowledged by many, as his long list of awards and accolades can prove. He’s won the Frederick Douglass Prize, the Lincoln Prize, the Merli Curti Award, the James A. Rawley Prize, and Bancroft Prize and now, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
- He believes: “The civil war is an event (and will probably always be an event) through which Americans have to somehow define themselves. It’s the event that first tested and destroyed the original American republic…” Catch the rest of his thoughts here:
