The featured speaker for the 2012 Researching New York Conference, David W. Blight will present a lecture, "America Divided, Then and Now: The Civil War in our National and Local Imagination." One of the foremost authorities on the U.S. Civil War, Blight is Professor of American History and Director, Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. He has authored numerous works including, most recently, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (2011) and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2002).