On May 11th at the Kauffman Foundation Conference Center in Kansas City, Missouri, Dr. David W. Blight, Class of ’54 Professor of History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University gave a free lecture entitled Has Civil War Memory Divided or United America? for Missouri and Kansas history teachers. The talk, funded in part by the Kauffman Foundation, was sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The lecture was followed by a question and answer period and refreshments. All attendees received a booklet of primary sources on slavery and the Civil War from the Gilder Lehrman Collection.

Blight is the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, for which he won the 2001 Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the 2002 Bancroft and Lincoln Prizes. Before his university career, Blight taught for seven years in a public high school in his hometown of Flint, Michigan. He was recently
a featured historian on The History Channel’s series
Ten Days that Unexpectedly Changed America.