The Jay Heritage Center is proud to welcome educators to our site during September 2026, Constitution Month, to commemorate our nation’s journey towards independence and democracy. The free program is co-sponsored by the Mid-Hudson Social Studies Council. The event will be a lively conversation about America at 250 with some of our country’s leading history scholars. It is open to teachers throughout the Mid Hudson and Sound Shore communities.
On September 19, starting at 3:30pm, Professors David Blight, Frank Cogliano, Joanne Freeman and Beverly Gage will take the stage at the new Wachenheim Center to examine the history of the nation-state and the contested nature of American national identity. The panel will discuss what the United States and the Constitution have meant to citizens over time and how that vision has changed or stayed constant. They will illustrate how the American Revolution was the first but not the last radical act of national reimagining in U.S. history. The panelists will engage with 150 attendees in a robust Q & A about how to bridge divides and engage in civil discourse while studying the complexities of our shared heritage together. The event will be recorded. Doors open at 3:30pm for a reception and refreshments. The event is FREE but registration is required because seating is limited. If you plan to attend in person, please RSVP to Suzanne Clary at jayheritagecenter@gmail.com
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The Mid Hudson Social Studies Council is a educational non-profit organization. It is affiliated with the New York State Council for the Social Studies (NYSCSS). They empower educators, engage students, encourage dialogue and inspire civic action. They provide members with at least two educational and/or informational workshops per year. They also keep members informed about what is happening on the state level with regard to Social Studies programs.
David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University
David W. Blight is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University, joining that faculty in January, 2003. He previously taught at Amherst College for thirteen years. As of June, 2004, he is Director, succeeding David Brion Davis, of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale. In 2013-14 he was the William Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge University, UK, and in 2010-11, Blight was the Rogers Distinguished Fellow in 19th century American History at the Huntington Library, San Marino, CA. During the 2006-07 academic year he was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. He is currently writing a new, full biography of Frederick Douglass that will be published by Simon and Schuster in 2015. Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as a member of a small team of advisors to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. For that institution he wrote the recently published essay, “Will It Rise: September 11 in American Memory.” In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and delivered an induction address, “The Pleasure and Pain of History.”
Blight’s newest books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. American Oracle is an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007), paperback in 2009. This book combines two newly discovered slave narratives in a volume that recovers the lives of their authors, John Washington and Wallace Turnage, as well as provides an incisive history of the story of emancipation. In June, 2004, the New York Times ran a front page story about the discovery and significance of these two rare slave narratives. A Slave No More garnered three book prizes, including the Connecticut Book Award for non-fiction. Blight recently published the articles, “The Theft of Lincoln in History, Politics, and Memory,” in Our Lincoln, Eric Foner, ed., (2008); and “Hating and Loving the ‘Real’ Abe Lincolns: Lincoln and the American South,” in Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln, (Oxford Univ. Press, 2011); “Mirror of Memory,” American Interest, August, 2011; and numerous op-ed columns for newspapers, including the New York Times and the New York Daily News.Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history. Other published works include a book of essays, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Frederick Douglass’s Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (LSU Press, 1989). Blight is the editor of and author of introductions for six other books, including When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster (Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1992); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Bedford Books, 1993); co-editor with Robert Gooding-Williams, W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Bedford Books, 1997); co-editor with Brooks Simpson, Union and Emancipation: Essays on Politics and Race in the Civil War Era (Kent State Univ. Press, 1997); and Caleb Bingham, The Columbian Orator (orig. 1797, NYU Press, 1997), the book of oratory and antislavery writings that Frederick Douglass discovered while a youth. The edited volume, Passages to Freedom: The Underground Railroad in History and Memory, was published by Smithsonian Press in 2004 and is the companion book for the opening of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati.
Blight is a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times, Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Slate.com and other newspapers, and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation (Houghton Mifflin). He is also series advisor and editor for the Bedford Books series in American History and Culture, a popular series of teaching books for the college level. Blight lectures widely in the US and around the world on the Civil War and Reconstruction, race relations, Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service, devoting a good deal of time to these and many other public history initiatives.
Blight has been a consultant to many documentary films, including, “Death and the Civil War,” (2012), the 1998 PBS series, “Africans in America,” and “The Reconstruction Era” (2004) among others. Blight has a Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and did his undergraduate degree at Michigan State University. He has also taught at Harvard University, at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, and for seven years was a public high school teacher in his hometown, Flint, Michigan. He was also senior Fulbright Professor in American Studies at the University of Munich in Germany in 1992-93.
Blight was elected as a member of the Society of American Historians in 2002, and served as that Society’s President in 2013-14. Board of Trustees or Advisory Board memberships include the New York Historical Society, the Benjamin Franklin Papers at Yale, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, the National Civil War Center at Tredegar in Richmond, VA, Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians, and the board for African American Programs at Monticello in Charlottesville, VA. He also served on the board of advisors to the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission and is involved in planning numerous conferences and events to commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War. In his capacity as director of the Gilder Lehrman Center at Yale, Blight organizes conferences, working groups, lectures, the administering of the annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, and many public outreach programs regarding the history of slavery and its abolition. Blight maintains a professional web site at davidwblight.com and his lectures for the course, “The Civil War and Reconstruction Era,” are available on line at the Yale University web site, Opencourses.Yale.edu. In 2009, Blight chaired the jury for non-fiction for the National Book Award.
Frank Cogliano, Professor of American History at the University of Edinburgh
A specialist in the history of the American Revolution and the early United States, Professor Cogliano is the author or editor of twelve books, including: A Revolutionary Friendship: Washington, Jefferson and the American Republic (2024); finalist for the 2025 George Washington Book Prize), Emperor of Liberty: Thomas Jefferson’s Foreign Policy (2014), The Blackwell Companion to Jefferson (2012), Thomas Jefferson: Reputation and Legacy (2006). His Revolutionary America, 1763-1815: A Political History is now in its fourth edition.
His most recent book (with Peter S. Onuf) Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours was published by Liveright Press in June, 2026. He is the editor of The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding which was published by the University of Virginia Press in April, 2026.
Along with Patrick Griffin, Christa Dierksheide and Eliga Gould he edits the Revolutionary Age series for the University of Virginia Press.
Frank is committed to engaging a wide audience with the study of history. For many years he was a workshop leader for school teachers, and co-hosts the American history podcast The Whiskey Rebellion.
Frank is the president of the Open History Society in Edinburgh. He makes regular media appearances, commenting on U.S. history, politics and international relations, for the BBC and other outlets. He has featured in five episodes of the BBC’s flagship In Our Time, as well as BBC Radio 4’s You’re Dead to Me. Frank was the historical consultant for Glass Entertainment’s 6-part documentary Thomas Jefferson, which aired on the History Channel in the US and Internationally in 2025. He also served as the historical consultant for a 2-part documentary on the American Revolution which aired in the BBC’s Lucy Worsley investigates series, in 2026.
During July – Dec 2026, Frank will be in residence at The George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon, VA as the recipient of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation Senior Fellowship in Political History, the Presidency, and Constitutional Thought
Joanne B. Freeman, Alan J. Boles, Jr. Professor of History and American Studies
Joanne B. Freeman, Alan J. Boles, Jr. Professor of History and American Studies, specializes in the politics and political culture of the revolutionary and early national periods of American history. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Her first book, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (Yale University), won the Best Book award from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic (2002). She has also edited Alexander Hamilton: Writings (Library of America) – one of the Atlantic Monthly’s “best books” of 2001; and The Essential Hamilton: Letters and Other Writings (Library of America); and co-edited Jeffersonian Republicans in Power, 1800-1824 with Johann Neem. Her most recent book, The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, explores physical violence in the U.S. Congress between 1830 and 1860, and what it suggests about Congress; American sectionalism; and the longstanding roots of the Civil War. A finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, it was a New York Times Notable Book for 2018, a best book of the year for Mother Jones and National Public Radio, and one of the 10 best history books of the year for the Smithsonian. Recent articles include “The Ethos of Revolution: Past and Present,” in The Revolution at 250, ed. Frank Cogliano (forthcoming, University of Virginia); and “Thinking Like a Colonist: The Road to 1776,” in Declaring the Revolution (forthcoming, University of Chicago).
An elected member of the Society of American Historians, the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the American Antiquarian Society, Freeman has won fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Dirkson Congressional Research Center, the American Historical Association, and the Library of Congress, among others. During the 2007-8 academic year, she was a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars, New York Public Library. In 2021-22, she was the President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. Freeman is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians and was rated one of the nation’s “Top Young Historians” in 2005. Board of Trustees or Advisory Board memberships include or have included The Society of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Library of America, the Benjamin Franklin Papers at Yale, the National Council for History Education, and the U.S. Capitol Historical Society. Recent awards include the William Hickling Prescott Award for Excellence in Historical Writing (with Heather Cox Richardson) from the Massachusetts Historical Society (2022); and the Paul Gagnon Prize for Scholarship and the Promotion of History Education from the National Council for History Education (2022).
Freeman’s articles have appeared in a wide range of academic journals including William and Mary Quarterly, Journal of the Early Republic, Journal of Policy History, and Yale Law Journal. She has written op-ed pieces for the New York Times, the Atlantic, Politico, and the Washington Post, among others; appeared in documentaries or as a commentator on PBS, CNN, ABC, CBS, and the History Channel; and on radio programs for NPR and the BBC.
Long committed to public-minded history, Freeman has co-curated museum exhibitions, been a historical consultant for documentary filmmakers, and gives frequent public lectures. A leading expert on Alexander Hamilton, she was the historical consultant for the National Park Service in its reconstruction of Alexander Hamilton’s home, the Alexander Hamilton Grange National Memorial; Lin-Manuel Miranda used Freeman’s work and consulted with her in writing Hamilton: An American Musical; and she was the main historical consultant from 2017-19 for Hamilton: An Exhibition, an interactive history exhibit created by the musical’s producers in Chicago. Freeman has also worked extensively with high school history teachers in workshops, lectures, and symposia around the nation.
Freeman’s public history work is also online. She was a co-host of the popular history podcast, BackStory from 2017-2020; co-hosted the award-winning history podcast Now & Then with Heather Cox Richardson from 2021-23; and as of 2024, the two co-host What the Heck Just Happened?, available weekly on their YouTube channels. Since 2020, Freeman’s weekly podcast, History Matters (…and So Does Coffee!),reaches thousands of people every week. Her most recent venture, the nighttime podcast A Few Thoughts for Those Who Can’t Sleep, reaches tens of thousands.
Two of Freeman’s Yale courses are also online and available on YouTube: The American Revolution (2010) at https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-116; and The DeVane Lecture: America at 250: A History (2025) and the podcast that accompanied it – co-taught with David Blight and Beverly Gage – at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNezTQrY_6XMNBWaZqLRdgpoq. Freeman maintains a professional website at https://www.joannebfreeman.com/. Her lectures and online work are on her YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@joannefreeman1755.
Freeman teaches graduate reading and research courses in early national American and political history; and undergraduate seminars on early national politics and political culture, as well as lecture courses on the American Revolution and early national America. She was awarded the William Clyde DeVane Teaching Award in 2017, and the Sidonie Miskimin Clauss Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities in 2018.Beverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of HistoryBeverly Gage is the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History. Her courses focus on 20th-century U.S. political history. She is currently writing a biography of Ronald Reagan, with an emphasis on the ways that debates over communism and the Cold War shaped his life and politics.
Her most recent book, This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip through U.S. History (2026), offers a behind-the-steering-wheel retelling of 250 years of U.S. history, starting at Philadelphia’s Revolution-era historic sites and ending at Disneyland in the 20th-century California dream. The book was a New York Times bestseller and a selection for Barack Obama’s 2026 Summer Reading List.
Her previous book G-Man: J. Edgar Hoover and the Making of the American Century, a biography of former FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, received the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, the Bancroft Prize in American History and Diplomacy, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography, the Barbara and David Zalaznick Book Prize in American History, and the Ellis W. Hawley Prize of the Organization of American Historians. G-Man was named a best book of 2022 by the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Smithsonian.
Professor Gage is also the author of The Day Wall Street Exploded: A Story of America in its First Age of Terror, which examined the history of terrorism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, focusing on the 1920 Wall Street bombing. In addition to her teaching and research, she writes for numerous journals and magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and the Washington Post.
In 2009, Professor Gage received the Sarai Ribicoff Award for teaching excellence in Yale College. In 2015, she was elected to serve as the first chair of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate. From 2017 to 2021, she served as director of Yale’s Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy. In 2025-2026, she co-chaired Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education.
With Professor Elizabeth Hinton, Professor Gage leads the Workshop in Modern U.S. History, a monthly speaker series for faculty and graduate students to discuss the latest scholarship in 20th-century U.S. history.
Her Fall 2025 course, America at 250: A History (co-taught with Professors Joanne Freeman and David Blight) is available on Yale’s YouTube Channel.
Professor Gage is a graduate of Yale University (1994, BA, American Studies) and Columbia University (2004, PhD, History).