Historian David Blight presents two newly surfaced slave narratives and frames emancipation as both individual action and military effect

Summary

Professor David Blight of Yale University spoke in Missoula about two recently discovered post‑emancipation slave autobiographies — by John Washington and Wallace Turnage — and used them to argue that emancipation on the ground required both the actions of enslaved people and the presence of Union armies and navies.

Professor David W. Blight of Yale University spoke in Missoula about two newly surfaced slave autobiographies and how those first‑person accounts illuminate how emancipation happened for individual people during the Civil War.

Blight framed the narratives by John Washington and Wallace Turnage as windows onto ‘‘how emancipation actually happened on the ground,’’ saying neither the presence of Union forces nor the fugitives’ own courage alone explains their freedom; ‘‘the answer to that has always been both,’’ he said.

Blight began by placing the narratives in the wider shift in American memory: he described a recent growth of public interest in slavery and emancipation through films, museum exhibitions and renewed scholarship. He argued that the rise of African American history within the national historical…

Historian David Blight presents two newly surfaced slave narratives and frames emancipation as both individual action and military effect

Summary

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