Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

David W. Blight

David W. Blight is a professor of American history at Yale, He won the Pulitzer Prize for his 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

None

At a Pivotal Moment of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass Delivered a Speech That Reframed What Was at Stake if Slavery Stood

In “The Mission of the War,” America’s incomparable orator helped turn public sentiment in favor of the Union and Abraham Lincoln, beginning the process of “national regeneration”