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About the Center
The Gilder Lehrman Center strives to make a vital contribution to the understanding of slavery and its role in the development of the modern world. While the Center's primary focus has been on scholarly research, it also seeks to bridge the divide between scholarship and public knowledge by opening channels of communication between the scholarly community and the wider public. In collaboration with secondary schools, museums, parks, historical societies, and other related institutions, the Center facilitates a locally rooted understanding of the global impact of slavery. To foster this understanding, the Center offers a variety of programs including:
- Annual International Conference
- Lectures, forums, and workshops
- Visiting residential research fellowships
- Frederick Douglass Book Prize, an award for the most outstanding book in English on the subject of slavery, resistance, or abolition across time and all nations.
- Professional development workshops for high school and middle school teachers
- Accessible online databases of historical documents
- Management of the World Bibliography of Slavery and Abolition
- Annual Working Group interdisciplinary forum that brings together selected scholars to investigate specific themes related to slavery
- Other collaborative efforts with local, statewide, national, and international institutions to promote public education about slavery and its destruction
Contact Information
Mailing Address:
PO Box 208206
New Haven, CT 06520-8206
Shipping Address:
230 Prospect St. Rm 300
New Haven, CT 06511
Phone: 203-432-3339
Fax: 203-432-6943
Email: gilder.lehrman.center@yale.edu
Directions to Luce Hall
David W. Blight, Director
Dr. Blight, the Class of 1954 Professor of History at Yale University, is the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received seven book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. He is also the author of a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989).
Blight participated closely in the discovery and bringing to light of two new slave narratives in 2004 and edited and introduced the book, with Harcourt Press, A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (2007).
As of the 2000 and 2004 editions, he is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation (Houghton Mifflin). Blight lectures widely on Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service. He has also been a consultant to several documentary films, including the 1998 PBS series, "Africans in America," and "The Reconstruction Era" (2004). Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan.
David Brion Davis, Director Emeritus
David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University and the founding director of the Gilder Lehrman Center, is the author of The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, and many other books. His 2006 book, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize from the Phi Beta Kappa Society. His other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the American Historical Associations' Albert J. Beveridge Award, the National Book Award, and the 2004 Bruce Catton Prize of the Society of American Historians for lifetime achievement. Davis is also the recipient of the 2004 Kidger Award from the New England History Teachers Association given to honor his devotion to teaching. Currently, Davis is working on The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation to conclude his magisterial series. Davis received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1956. He served as President of the Organization of American Historians for the 1988-1989 term.
Dana Schaffer, Assistant Director
Dana Schaffer joined the staff of the Gilder Lehrman Center in August 2004. After serving as the education coordinator for the New England Historic Genealogical Society, Dana worked as a program coordinator for Smithsonian Journeys where she developed educational travel programs focusing on history, natural history, and arts and culture. While living in Washington, DC, Dana volunteered with the after-school program KidPower DC, working with inner-city fourth and fifth graders to foster the study of local history as a starting point for comprehensive citizenship training. She also served as assistant curator for the Mount Vernon Square Community Gallery exhibition at the City Museum of Washington, DC. As part of her graduate work, Dana conducted an oral history project on the 1968 riots in Washington, DC, which was published as an article in the peer-reviewed journal Washington History. She has also presented papers on her research at the Oral History Association Conference and Washington Historical Studies Conference and has worked at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the North Carolina State Archives, and Harvard University Archives. Dana holds a B.A in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an M.A. in Public History from American University.
Thomas Thurston, Education Director
Thomas Thurston holds a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MPhl in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to the Gilder Lehrman Center he served as the Project Director of the New Deal Network, an educational website developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University. For his work developing the New Deal Network he received the first annual award for "Best Multimedia Resource" from the American Association for History and Computing and a "Best of the Humanities on the Web" citation from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Tom has led week-long NEH workshops for K-12 teachers, has acted as a consulting historian for several Teaching American History programs, and has served as a curriculum developer for WNET's Educational Technologies Department, including the recent documentary series "The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow" and "Slavery and the Making of America." He currently serves as president of the Connecticut Coordinating Committee for the Promotion of History and as president of the board of trustees for the Yale Summer Cabaret Theater. He is married to Stacey Robertson, a history professor at Bradley University.
Visiting Fellows
Steven Deyle, University of Houston (September-December 2011)
"Honorable Men: Isaac Bolton, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the Murder of James McMillan"
Christoph W. Witzenrath, Shklar Fellow, Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (October 2011)
"Slavery, Redemption, and Moral Capital in Seventeenth-Century Ukraine"
Laura Roseanne Adderley, Tulane University (February-May 2012)
"'Horrors Committed': A Story of Slave Ship Rape and International Abolition in the Nineteenth Century Atlantic World"
Gregory P. Downs, City College of New York, CUNY (January 2012)
"The Freedmen's Bureau"
Samuel Martinez, University of Connecticut, Storrs (February 2012)
"Texts and Contexts of Contemporary Slavery Narratives"
Audra A. Diptee, Carleton University (April 2012)
"Children as Commodities: Child Slavery in Colonial Benin, 1890-1960"
Zoe Trodd, Columbia University (May 2012)
"Footprints: Frederick Douglass in Myth and Memory"
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