College to Host Symposium in Honor of Tad Kuroda

"Has Civil War Memory Divided or United America?" Yale University scholar David W. Blight will answer the question when he gives the inaugural Tad Kuroda Lecture at Skidmore Friday, April 7. Scheduled at 8 p.m. in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain Hall, the talk is free and open to the public.

Since 2003 Blight has taught at Yale University, where he is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and the director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.

In his award-winning book, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), Blight presents a new way of understanding the nation's collective response to the war, arguing that in the interest of reunification, the country ignored the racist underpinnings of the war, leaving a legacy of racial conflict. The book has won 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 also is the author of a book of essays titled Beyond the Battlefield: Race and the Civil War in American History and Memory (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass's Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989). Blight is the editor of and author of introductions for six books, including "When This Cruel War Is Over": The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), and is co-editor with Brooks Simpson of Politics and Race in the Civil War Era: Essays in Honor of Richard H. Sewell (Kent State University Press, 1997).

In 2004 Blight participated in the discovery and bringing to light of two new slave narratives that will serve as the basis for a forthcoming book from Harcourt Press.

A frequent book reviewer for The Washington Post Book World, Blight has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African-American intellectual and cultural history. He lectures widely on Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He also teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service.

Blight has a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has taught at Amherst College, Harvard University, and North Central College in Naperville, Ill.

The College's Tad Kuroda Lecture is part of a weekend symposium that honors Kuroda, a longtime member of the History Department, who retired in 2005. One of Skidmore's most popular and respected professors, Kuroda earned degrees at Yale and Columbia before joining the Skidmore faculty in 1969. A specialist in American history, Kuroda is an expert on the Electoral College, which was the topic of his 1991 Edwin M. Moseley Faculty Research Lecture. Selection as the Moseley Lecturer is the highest honor that the Skidmore faculty may bestow upon a colleague.