All News

February 22 was the 150th anniversary of Jefferson Davis's announcement of the Confederate cabinet and Abraham Lincoln's enunciation of his goals for America at a speech in Philadelphia. It was also the date on which Yale University Professor David Blight visited Hamilton to present a retrospective on American views of the Civil War. By examining a pair of 20th century authors who wrote on the topic, Blight illustrated long-term trends on the way Americans think about the Civil War and the nation.

David W. Blight, the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University, will lecture on Tuesday, Feb. 22, at 7 p.m., in the Hamilton College Chapel. The title of his talk is “The Civil War in Modern Memory: Robert Penn Warren and James Baldwin at the Centennial.” The lecture, sponsored by Hamilton’s History Department, is free and open to the public.