David Blight and Meghan O’Rourke on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’

Yale’s David Blight, Sterling Professor of History, of African American Studies, and of American Studies, and Meghan O’Rourke, editor of The Yale Review, each recently appeared on WHYY’s Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine “Fresh Air,” hosted by Terry Gross. 

‘The remarkable life of Frederick Douglass’

From Fresh Air: “Historian David Blight’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography traced Frederick Douglass’ path from slavery to abolitionist and inspired HBO’s documentary, ‘Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches.’ ‘Seeing and hearing Douglass became, through the course of the 19th century, a kind of American wonder of the world,’ Blight says.”

‘Long COVID, chronic illness & searching for answers’

From Fresh Air: “Meghan O'Rourke says long COVID and other chronic illnesses put an unwieldy burden on patients, who have to testify to the reality of their own illness. Her new book, ‘The Invisible Kingdom,’ chronicles her personal struggle to find diagnoses for her own nerve pain, brain fog, extreme fatigue and other symptoms. ‘When you're at the edge of medical knowledge, the lack of evidence is treated as evidence that the problem is you and your mind,’ O’Rourke says. ‘I felt, in a sense, kind of locked away in a room like a 19th-century hysteric.’”