The 2025 Fortenbaugh Lecture will be a roundtable discussion on The Past, Present, and Future of the Civil War, featuring three eminent historians whose work has transformed the field of Civil War studies: David Blight, Drew Gilipin Faust and Stephanie McCurry. Blight, Faust, and McCurry's contributions to the field are particularly notable for the way their work has resonated amongst both scholarly and popular audiences, changing the conversations about Civil War history taking place both inside and outside the academic world.
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom; American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. Blight has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others. He writes frequently for the popular press, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and many other journals, and has always been a teacher first, beginning his career as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.
Drew Gilpin Faust is Arthur Kingsley Porter University Research Professor at Harvard University, where she served as president from 2007 to 2018. She came to Harvard in 2001 as founding dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study after 25 years on the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. Faust is the author of seven books, including Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury, published in August 2023. Her earlier book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, was awarded the Bancroft Prize, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was recognized by the New York Times as one of the ten best books of 2008. This Republic of Suffering is the basis for a 2012 Emmy-nominated episode of the PBS American Experience documentaries titled Death and the Civil War, directed by Ric Burns.
Stephanie McCurry teaches at Columbia University, where she is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History. She is the author of three books, including Women’s War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War and Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South, which won numerous book awards, including the Frederick Douglass Book Prize and the Merle Curti Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Nation, the TLS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Irish Times. McCurry is currently working on a book which is under contract with Simon and Schuster. The book is a new history of Reconstruction in the United States that identifies the intimate as a domain of power that reframes the scale and challenge of the era.