Normally my various interests are well-compartmentalized, so it's fun when two or more come together like they do today. I've recently been posting lots of videos from the Majority Report and I was very pleased to see that the MR had had an interview with one of my favorite historians, David Blight.
Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Frederick Douglass, and was featured prominently in the documentary "Frederick Douglass in Five Speeches" (highly recommended) which is how I came to learn about Blight - I am currently doing research for a play I am writing about the relationship between Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, who met three times while Lincoln was president.
Blight is an expert on the Civil War and one of his most important discoveries was the first, unofficial observation of Memorial Day, by formerly enslaved people. You can watch him discuss it in this video at the NY Historical Society website (I've recently become a member of the NYHS)
My only complaint about Blight is that he is one of the liberals who got suckered into what I believe is a Koch and Thiel funded (directly and indirectly) project, the Harper's Letter. All those well-known liberals gave a right-wing project a nice bipartisan camouflage. Blight should have known better.
