The Harrisburg Book Festival is honored to host award-winning art historian Sarah Lewis for a conversation and signing on her new book, THE UNSEEN TRUTH: WHEN RACE CHANGED SIGHT IN AMERICA. Lewis will be in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, David W. Blight. This event is free and open to the public.

About the Event:

There was a time when Americans were confronted with the fictions shoring up the nation’s racial regime and learned to disregard them. The true significance of this hidden history has gone unseen—until now. In a masterpiece of historical detective work, award-winning art historian Sarah Lewis exposes one of the most damaging lies in American history, uncovering a pivotal era in the story of race in the United States when Americans came to ignore the truth about the false foundations of the nation’s racial regime.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Blight joins Lewis for a groundbreaking conversation on the history of race from the Civil War to the Great War, showing us how Americans forged a lethal racial regime with their eyes as much as their minds.

Featured Book: The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

• This event is free and open to the public and will take place on the main stage at the Midtown Scholar Bookstore. No registration is required.

• Seating is general admission; first come, first served.

• A public book signing will immediately follow the discussion. Purchasing an author’s new book from the Midtown Scholar Bookstore is required for entry to the signing line. (Additional copies of a book, purchased elsewhere, may also be signed if time permits).

About the Speakers:

Sarah Lewis is the founder of Vision & Justice and the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Humanities and Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America, the bestseller, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery, and the forthcoming book Vision & Justice. Lewis is a sought-after public speaker, with a mainstage TED talk that received over 3 million views. She lives in New York City and Cambridge, MA.

David W. Blight is the Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era; and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory; and annotated editions of Douglass’s first two autobiographies. He has worked on Douglass much of his professional life, and been awarded the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize, among others.