Virtual event.

This event is part of the Washington History Seminar series. It is cosponsored by the AHA and the Woodrow Wilson Center and features author Chad Williams and commentators Michelle Moyd and David Blight. Register here.

David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. Blight’s newest books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. 

Michelle Moyd is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University. She is a historian of eastern Africa, with special interests in the region’s history of soldiering and warfare. Her first book, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa explores the social and cultural history of African soldiers (askari) in the colonial army of German East Africa, today’s Tanzania. She is particularly interested in bringing the experience of nineteenth-century African-American soldiers into a broader analysis of soldiers of empire.