© photo by Jeff Day

Ben Davidson

Ben Davidson

Doctoral Student Fellow

Department of History, Graduate School of Arts & Science
Project: Freedom’s Generation: Coming of Age in the Era of Emancipation

Ben Davidson is a PhD candidate in United States History at NYU. His dissertation traces the lives of the generation of black and white children, in the North, South, and West, who grew up during the Civil War era and were the first generation to come of age after the end of slavery. The project explores how young people learned persistent lessons carried into adulthood about complexities inherent in ideas and experiences of emancipation, and it assesses how these lessons were transformed in memory by the turn of the twentieth century. Davidson’s research has been supported by a Jacob Javits fellowship, as well as by short-term awards from the Huntington Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, and the Virginia Historical Society, among others. He has taught high school English, worked as a researcher for a children’s book publisher, and taught History 101 at NYU.