Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition

The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition is part of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. The center was founded in November 1998 by David Brion Davis and funded by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Davis was the center director 1998-2004.

The mission is to promote the study of all aspects of slavery, especially the chattel slave system and its destruction. The center seeks to foster an improved understanding of the role of slavery, slave resistance, and abolition in the Western world by promoting interaction and exchange between scholars, teachers, and public historians through publications, educational outreach, and other programs and events.

The center director is historian David W. Blight, professor of History at Yale University, and author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received seven 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. He is also the author of 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).