June 30, 2025

216: David Blight: Why How We Remember the Past Matters

48 minutes

“If you’re not ready on some level for the tragedies of history, they’re coming to get you.”

In September of 2020 Professor David Blight got an unexpected call from his boss. The President of Yale wanted Blight to work on a project about Yale’s historical involvement with slavery. The undertaking was so enormous that the Pulitzer Prize winning historian remembers sitting on the phone “wishing that conversation wasn't happening.” But 4 years later the book was published. Yale and Slavery: A History has been lauded as “the most mature examination ever made of the role of slavery in a university’s past.”

Lee sits down with David to discuss why how we remember the past matters. “This idea that we don't want history to be divisive or to make people feel unpleasant or unhappy…is of course to manufacture tales that just don't hold up. Which is another way of saying it's like spreading lies in the service of nationalism.”

Show Notes

Resources:

“Yale and Slavery: A History”

"Fredrick Douglass: Profit of Freedom"

The Yale Slavery and Research Project

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Transcript

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