the David Brion Davis Memorial Endowed Resource Fund

The Gilder Lehrman Center Legacy Fund

Twenty-one years ago, the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies was founded at Yale University. The Gilder Lehrman Center was the first institution in the world wholly devoted to scholarship, public education, and outreach about the global problem of slavery across all borders and all time. In a world that needs this work now more than ever, we invite you to join us in sustaining our mission to foster an improved academic and public understanding of the role of slavery, its destruction, and its legacies in the functioning of the modern world.

To support the annual programming, outreach, and other key activities of the Gilder Lehrman Center, please contribute to the Gilder Lehrman Center Legacy Fund.

What’s New at the Gilder Lehrman Center

Monuments to America’s true ideals and history, like Alison Saar’s Harriet Tubman Memorial, “Swing Low,” in Harlem, should be built nationwide. Credit HSP Archive

Reimagining America’s Memorial Landscape

July 17, 2020
This article appeared in the New York Times. Written by David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery,...

The Gilder Lehrman Center Receives Connecticut Humanities Award

July 6, 2020
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at the MacMillan Center at Yale University is pleased to announce that they are the recipients...
Protesters call for the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond, Virginia, in June.Photograph by Eze Amos / Getty

Europe in 1989, America in 2020, and the Death of the Lost Cause

July 1, 2020
In November, 1989, when the Berlin Wall suddenly began to crumble and then fall, much of the world watched in awe. Could it be true that Communism was about to collapse? For...

OPINION: Storm clouds on the horizon for U.S. human trafficking rankings

June 30, 2020
Formerly U.S. Ambassador to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons, Luis C.deBaca is Senior Fellow at Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of...

Yes, the Freedmen’s Memorial uses racist imagery. But don’t tear it down.

June 26, 2020
The Freedmen’s Memorial in Washington is not a Confederate monument. It famously exhibits a standing Abraham Lincoln seemingly giving freedom to a kneeling black man naked...

James Weldon Johnson’s “Fifty Years”: An Earlier Commemoration of Emancipation

June 22, 2020
African American cultural memory of slavery, emancipation and the Civil War reached an important apex on January 1, 1913, when James Weldon Johnson, musical lyricist,...

Celebrating Juneteenth: The Legacy of Frederick Douglass with Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. and David W. Blight

June 19, 2020
New-York Historical Society Program date: June 11, 2020 What did the nation look like in the years following the end of the Civil War and the emancipation of African...
David Blight

David Blight on America’s call for a modern-day civil rights movement

June 15, 2020
On June 9, New England Public Radio spoke with David Blight, professor of history, African American studies and American studies and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for...

“What’s Going on?”

June 5, 2020
At the Gilder Lehrman Center we want to express our continued commitment to using history, and knowledge more generally, as well as our teaching and our imaginations to face...
Richard Gilder, 2013 Frederick Douglass Book Prize award ceremony

Richard Gilder, Jr., 1932-2020

May 13, 2020
 On May 12, 2020, Richard Gilder, Jr. died.  Above all Dick was a great New Yorker, an extraordinary and generous Yale University graduate, class of 1954, and a visionary...
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