Frederick Douglass

Historian David W. Blight follows Frederick Douglass from his escape from slavery in Baltimore to his standing as the nation's most celebrated orator. Taught to read by the woman who owned him, Douglass became a major literary figure, writing three versions of his autobiography and running his own newspaper. Blight shows him mentored by William Lloyd Garrison, then splitting with him for political abolitionism, the Republican party and Lincoln, and later condemning the early end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow. The book also covers his two marriages and extended family, drawing on a private collection few historians have consulted and newly found issues of his newspapers. It received the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Barack Obama named it on his best of 2018 list, shared on Facebook.