Admission is free, but limited to 120 ticket holders, with advanced tickets available for pick-up at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum’s Museum Store, the Talbot County Free Library’s Easton Branch, or through members of the Frederick Douglass Honor Society. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event.
The first major biography of Douglass in 25 years, “Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom” is a dramatic biography of the escaped slave and Talbot County native who became the greatest orator of his day, and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.
For the book, Blight drew on new information held in a private collection that few historians have consulted, as well as recently discovered issues of Douglass’s newspapers.
The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik’s calls the book “extraordinary” in his recent review of the biography, stating, “In telling this great story, Blight, a historian at Yale, confronts one great difficulty: Douglass himself wrote his own life three times, each time thrillingly well, though each time with a slightly different purpose,” and continuing with “Blight’s biography, particularly in its early pages, is necessarily a kind of palimpsest: he dives back and forth beneath Douglass’s texts, sifting and sorting and weaving.”
The event takes place in the waterfront Van Lennep Auditorium at CBMM. For more information about the program, call CBMM’s John Ford at 410-745-4970 or email jford@cbmm.org. For more information about the Talbot County Free Library or the Frederick Douglass Honor Society, go to tcfl.org or frederickdouglasshonorsociety.org.
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~ Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum