GBH Openvault

American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 1 of 6

Part of The Abolitionists Interviews.

2013

David William Blight is Class of 1954 Professor of American History at Yale University and Director of the Gilder-Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. His works include: Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War; and A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation.

Series

American Experience

Program

The Abolitionists

Program Number

2501, 2502, 2503

Title

Interview with David William Blight, part 1 of 6

Series Description

As television's longest-running, most-watched history series, American Experience brings to life the incredible characters and epic stories that helped form this nation. Now in its eighteenth season, the series has produced over 180 programs and garnered every major broadcast award.

Program Description

On January 1, 1863, when abolitionist leaders Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison received word that the Emancipation Proclamation had declared three million enslaved African Americans "forever free," it was the culminating moment of the most important civil rights crusade in American history, and the climax of a long and difficult friendship between two remarkable men. In this series, the 150th anniversary of the Proclamation, American Experience tells the story of how Douglass, Garrison and their abolitionist allies Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and Angelina Grimke turned a despised fringe movement against chattel slavery into a force that literally changed the nation. The "holy warriors" of emancipation captured the private details of their tumultuous political and personal journeys toward freedom in letters, diaries, newspaper articles, and memoirs. They revealed themselves to be willful, arrogant, righteous, and unbending, yet empathic, faithful, loyal, candid, and just. They fought the slave-holding South with a moral passion and bickered among themselves with petty familiarity. Along the way, they fell in love, got married, had families, lost loved ones, formed cliques, quarreled and made up.

Duration

0:29:09

Asset Type

Raw video

Media Type

Video

Topics

History

Creators

Rapley, Rob (Producer)

Contributors

Blight, David William (Interviewee)

Publication Information

WGBH Educational Foundation

Rights Summary

Rights Holder: WGBH Educational Foundation

Citation

Chicago: “American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 1 of 6,” 2013, GBH Archives, accessed December 22, 2024, http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_A446A4DB0DA6499DAD2F15A017784DE3.

MLA: “American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 1 of 6.” 2013. GBH Archives. Web. December 22, 2024. <http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_A446A4DB0DA6499DAD2F15A017784DE3>.

APA: American Experience; The Abolitionists; Interview with David William Blight, part 1 of 6. Boston, MA: GBH Archives. Retrieved from http://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_A446A4DB0DA6499DAD2F15A017784DE3