This year’s Henry R. Heyburn ’39 Speaker in History, Professor Blake Gilpin, used his expertise on the 1850s abolitionist John Brown to illustrate how the narratives of history are created: by combining fact, perspective, and sometimes imagination. Dr. Gilpin, a professor of history at Tulane University, has spent a decade studying John Brown and the cultural phenomena surrounding the man and his legend. His book John Brown Still Lives!: America’s Long Reckoning with Violence, Equality, and Change was a finalist for Gilder Lehrman Center’s Frederick Douglass Book Prize. Dr. Gilpin earned his Ph.D. from Yale University.
“You are all historians, the moment you learn two facts and link them together, creating a narrative. Our history actually tells us more about who we are today than about people in the past. And that’s okay. We need that narrative, that context, to make sense of who we are, and where we are, now.”