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Continuing Chautauqua’s weeklong commemoration of “America at 250,” two of the country’s pre-eminent historians present a mainstage conversation about the moral foundations of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and how they have been interpreted and reinterpreted throughout American history.

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. In 2020, Yale President Peter Salovey appointed him as chair of the Yale and Slavery Working Group. With his Working Group colleagues, Blight authored the book Yale and Slavery: A History, a narrative study of Yale’s historic involvement and associations with slavery and its aftermaths, published by Yale University Press in February of 2024.

Blight is the immediate past president of the Organization of American Historians. He previously taught at North Central College in Illinois, Harvard University and Amherst College. 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.

In 2020, Blight was elected to the American Philosophical Society and awarded the Gold Medal for History by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At the beginning of his career, he spent seven years as a high school history teacher in his hometown of Flint, Michigan.

Tiya Miles is a public historian and the author of eight books that explore Black, Indigenous and women’s history; place and environment; and contemporary uses of the past. These works include four prize-winning histories and one prize-winning novel about slavery and its legacies. Her 2021 National Book Award winner, All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, a Black Family Keepsake, was a New York Times bestseller that won eleven historical and literary prizes.

Miles’ latest work is Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her other books include Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation; The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits; The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story; Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom; Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era; and the novel The Cherokee Rose.

Miles publishes frequently in national periodicals, and her work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation (“genius award”), the Guggenheim Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she currently serves as the Michael Garvey Professor of History at Harvard University.

This program is sponsored by The Malcolm Anderson Lecture Fund.