Today, Tom's first guest is the award-winning author and historian, David Blight.
He is the author of several books, including Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, which won nine prestigious literary awards, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize.
David Blight is the Sterling Professor of History at Yale University and Director of The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
He will deliver the keynote address tonight at the 2026 Loyola University Maryland Humanities Symposium.
The theme of the symposium this year is Life, Liberty, and the Unfinished Work of Democracy, and Blight's address will connect the soaring ideals set forth in America's 1776 Declaration of Independence with Frederick Douglass's famous 1852 speech, "What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?"
The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in McGuire Hall, in the Andrew White Student Center on the Loyola University campus in North Baltimore.
Professor David Blight shared some thoughts about his address when he spoke with Tom last week on Zoom from New Haven, Connecticut.
