David W. Blight Wins 2019 William H. Seward Award
The Civil War Forum was honored to present its 2019 William H. Seward Award for Excellence in Civil War Biography to David W. Blight for his 2018 book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, the 2019 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in History. David Blight is currently professor of American History at Yale University since 2003, after having taught for 13 years at Amherst College, and at Harvard University before that. At Yale, he is also the Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. He has served as the William Pitt Professor of American History at England's Cambridge University; the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th Century American History at the esteemed Huntington Library in California; and a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library, in addition to having been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His previous works on this facet of American History are Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee; Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation; and Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory and the American Civil War. He has numerous other writing and editing accomplishments, has been a Book Review editor for several leading newspapers, and teaches summer institutes for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service. Read more about David Blight at http://www.davidwblight.com/.
The Seward Award is endowed through the generosity of James W. Davis, a founding member of the Forum. The Award includes an invitation to visit the Forum in New York City and a $2,000 stipend. Winners are chosen by the Forum's Seward Award Committee. Past winners of the Seward Award are listed below.
Past Winners of the William H. Seward Award For Excellence in Civil War Biography
2009 — Joan Waugh — U.S. Grant: American Hero, American Myth
2010 — Gail Stephens — Shadow of Shiloh: Maj. Gen. Lew Wallace
2011 — Tony Horwitz — Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War
2012 — Henry W. Brands — The Man Who Saved the Union In War and In Peace, Ulysses S. Grant
2013 — Walter Stahr — Seward: Lincoln's Indispensable Man
2014 — Robert W. Lull — Civil War General and Indian Fighter, James M. Williams
2015 — Robert L. O'Connell — Fierce Patriot—The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman
2015 — S. C. Gwynne — Rebel Yell: The Vision, passion, and Redemption of Stonewall Jackson
2016 — T.J. Stiles — Custer's Trials
2017 — Ronald C. White — American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant
2017 — Timothy Egan — Immortal Irishman