After being hired by Yale in 2003 and teaching as a full professor, in 2006 Blight was selected to direct the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition. His primary focus is on the American Civil War and how American society grappled with the war in its aftermath. His 2007 book A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation context for newly discovered first-person accounts by two African-American slaves who escaped during the Civil War and emancipated themselves.[5]
He also lectures for One Day University. In Spring 2008, Blight recorded a 27-lecture course, The Civil War and Reconstruction Era, 1845–1877 for Open Yale Courses, which is available online.
Blight wrote Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, released in 2018, as the first major biography of Douglass in nearly three decades. One reviewer called it "the definitive biography of Frederick Douglass" and another heralded the book as "the new Frederick Douglass standard-bearer for years to come."[6][7] It earned the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in history and the 2019 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize.[8]
Contributing to the anthology Our American Story (2019), Blight addressed the possibility of a shared American narrative. He cited Frederick Douglass's 1867 speech titled "Composite Nation" calling for a "multi-ethnic, multi-racial 'nation' ... incorporated into this new vision of a 'composite' nationality, separating church and state, giving allegiance to a single new constitution, federalizing the Bill of Rights, and spreading liberty more broadly than any civilization had ever attempted". Blight concluded that although the search for a new unified American story would be difficult, "we must try".[9]
In July 2020, Blight was one of the 153 signers of the "Harper's Letter", published in Harper's Magazine and titled "A Letter on Justice and Open Debate", which expressed concern that "The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted."[10]
"They Knew What Time It Was: African-Americans". Gabor Boritt, ed. (1996). Why the Civil War Came. Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-507941-8.
"The Theft of Lincoln in Scholarship, Politics, and Public Memory". Eric Foner, ed. (2008). Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN978-0-393-06756-9.
Blight, David W., ed. When This Cruel War Is Over: The Civil War Letters of Charles Harvey Brewster. University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, 2009.
"Hating and Loving the 'Real' Abe Lincolns: Lincoln and the American South" (2011). Richard Carwardine and Jay Sexton, eds., The Global Lincoln. New York: Oxford University Press.
"Introduction" (co-authored with Gregory P. Downs and Jim Downs). David W. Blight and Jim Downs, eds. (2017). Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. University of Georgia Press. 2017. ISBN9780820351483.
"Composite Nation?", Joshua Claybourn, ed. (2019). Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative. Potomac Books. ISBN978-1640121706.
"Foreword: From Every Point of the Compass out of the Countless Graves". Brian Matthew Jordan; Jonathan W. White, eds. (2023). Final Resting Places: Reflections on the Meaning of Civil War Graves. The University of Georgia Press. ISBN9780820364551.
^Claybourn, Joshua, ed. (2019). Our American Story: The Search for a Shared National Narrative. Lincoln, NE: Potomac Books. pp. 3–18. ISBN978-1640121706.
^"New England Book Awards". New England Independent Booksellers Association. Archived from the original on December 22, 2023. Retrieved December 22, 2023.