Annette Gordon-Reed

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But does the nation begin in 1776, or do we trace its origins to some point earlier—for example, the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619 or the initial settlement of Indigenous people? What's at stake with establishing a date that marks the nation’s origins? Where does the history of the nation begin? In colonial New England, the Chesapeake, or in the Southwest? In this unprecedented volume, leading thinkers come together to debate these—and many other—issues. Their conversation shows that U.S history is not just about what happened but who gets to tell the story and the political implications of the narratives we tell. The participants include two Pulitzer Prize Winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project and ignited a national conversation about slavery and the nation’s founding; and Annette Gordon-Reed, who documented Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings. The other specialists include experts in Asian American, civil rights, Native American, Latino, LGBT, and Early American history.

The year 2026 marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. But does the nation begin in 1776, or do we trace its origins to some point earlier—for example, the arrival of the first enslaved people in 1619 or the initial settlement of Indigenous people? What's at stake with establishing a date that marks the nation’s origins? Where does the history of the nation begin? In colonial New England, the Chesapeake, or in the Southwest? In this unprecedented volume, leading thinkers come together to debate these—and many other—issues. Their conversation shows that U.S history is not just about what happened but who gets to tell the story and the political implications of the narratives we tell. The participants include two Pulitzer Prize Winners: Nikole Hannah-Jones, who created the 1619 Project and ignited a national conversation about slavery and the nation’s founding; and Annette Gordon-Reed, who documented Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings. The other specialists include experts in Asian American, civil rights, Native American, Latino, LGBT, and Early American history.

When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Among all aspects of Jefferson's renowned life, it was perhaps the most hotly contested topic. The publication of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies in many noted scholars' evaluations of the existing evidence. In this study, Gordon-Reed assembles a fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged thirty-eight-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing.Friends of Jefferson sought to debunk the Hemings story as early as 1800, and most subsequent historians and biographers followed suit, finding the affair unthinkable based upon their view of Jefferson's life, character, and beliefs. Gordon-Reed responds to these critics by pointing out numerous errors and prejudices in their writings, ranging from inaccurate citations, to impossible time lines, to virtual exclusions of evidence-especially evidence concerning the Hemings family. She demonstrates how these scholars may have been misguided by their own biases and may even have tailored evidence to serve and preserve their opinions of Jefferson. This updated edition of the book also includes an afterword in which the author comments on the DNA study that provided further evidence of a Jefferson and Hemings liaison.Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Annette Gordon-Reed writes with a style and compassion that are irresistible. Each chapter revolves around a key figure in the Hemings drama, and the resulting portraits are engrossing and very personal. Gordon-Reed also brings a keen intuitive sense of the psychological complexities of human relationships-relationships that, in the real world, often develop regardless of status or race. The most compelling element of all, however, is her extensive and careful research, which often allows the evidence to speak for itself. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy is the definitive look at a centuries-old question that should fascinate general readers and historians alike.

Fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reassured the nation from his deathbed, “Thomas Jefferson survives”. Unaware that Jefferson had died hours earlier, Adams was in a larger sense correct: Jefferson had been immortalised in the American imagination. Today, Jefferson has effectively become a partisan talisman—jettisoned by the left for his moral failings, embraced and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with the reductive clichés that now define Jefferson’s legacy, Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano restore the founding father to his historical context, elucidating how Jefferson’s understanding of history shaped his responses to the crises of his time, how he conceived of the physical entity that became the United States and how he articulated a new national identity in 1776. Through their search for understanding, Onuf and Cogliano demonstrate not only why Jefferson matters but how his wisdom can be applied today. Peter S. Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed’s “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” was praised as: "An important book…[R]ichly rewarding. It is full of fascinating insights about Jefferson." —Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books “A fresh and layered analysis...” –Peter Baker, The New York Times Book Review

A radical new vision of the nation's founding era and a major act of historical recovery Featuring more than 120 writers, this groundbreaking anthology reveals the astonishing richness and diversity of Black experience in the turbulent decades of the American Revolution Black Writers of the Founding Era is the most comprehensive anthology ever published of Black writing from the turbulent decades surrounding the birth of the United States. An unprecedented archive of historical sources--including more than 200 poems, letters, sermons, newspaper advertisements, slave narratives, testimonies of faith and religious conversion, criminal confessions, court transcripts, travel accounts, private journals, wills, petitions for freedom, even dreams, by over 100 authors--it is a collection that reveals the surprising richness and diversity of Black experience in the new nation. Here are writers both enslaved and free, loyalist and patriot, female and male, northern and southern; soldiers, seamen, and veterans; painters, poets, accountants, orators, scientists, community organizers, preachers, restaurateurs and cooks, hairdressers, criminals, carpenters, and many more. Along with long-famous works like Phillis Wheatley's poems and Benjamin Banneker's astonishing mathematical and scientific puzzles are dozens of first-person narratives offering little-known Black perspectives on the events of the times, like the Boston Massacre and the death of George Washington. From their bold and eloquent contributions to public debates about the meanings of the revolution and the values of the new nation-- writings that dramatize the many ways in which protest, activism, and community organizing have been integral to the Black American experience from the beginning--to their intimate thoughts preserved in private diaries and letters, some unseen to the present day, the words of the many writers gathered here will indelibly alter our understandings of American history. A foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed and an introduction by James G. Basker, along with introductory headnotes and explanatory notes drawing on cutting edge scholarship, illuminate these writers' works and to situate them in their historical contexts. A 16-page color photo insert presents portraits of some of the writers included and images of the original manuscripts, broadside, and books in which their words have been preserved.

An unflinching look at Charleston, a beautiful, endangered port city, founded by English settlers in 1669 as a hub of the sugar and slave trades, which now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race. Unbeknownst to the tourists who visit the charming streets of the Charleston peninsula, rapidly rising sea levels and increasingly devastating storms are mere years away from rendering the city uninhabitable. Weaving science, narrative history, and the family stories of Black Charlestonians, Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm chronicles the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city – from protests to hurricanes – while illuminating the escalating riskiness of its future. Charleston’s vulnerability is emblematic of vast portions of global coastlines that are likely to be chronically inundated in just a few decades. In Charleston, as in other global cities, little planning is underway to ensure a thriving future for all residents. Charleston, by Harvard Law School professor and author Susan Crawford, tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America’s painful racial history for centuries. Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed, Pulitzer Prize winning author of On Juneteenth.

Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle and searing episodes of memoir, On Juneteenth recounts the origins of the holiday that celebrates the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. A descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, Annette Gordon-Reed, explores the legacies of the holiday. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas—in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown—to the day in Galveston on 19 June 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery, Gordon-Reed’s insightful and inspiring essays present the saga of a “frontier” peopled by Native Americans, Anglos, Tejanos and Blacks that became a slaveholder’s republic. Reworking the “Alamo” framework, Gordon-Reed shows that the slave-and race-based economy not only defined this fractious era of Texas independence, but precipitated the Mexican-American War and the resulting Civil War. A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is a stark reminder that the fight for equality is on-going.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham offers a collection of inspiring words about how to be a good citizen, from Thomas Jefferson and others, and reminds us why our country's founding principles are still so important today. Thomas Jefferson believed in the covenant between a government and its citizens, in both the government's responsibilities to its people and also the people's responsibility to the republic. In this illuminating book, a project of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, the #1 New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham presents selections from Jefferson's writing on the subject, with an afterword by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed and comments on Jefferson's ideas from others, including Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Frederick Douglass, Carl Sagan, and American presidents. This curated collection revitalizes how to see an individual's role in the world, as it explores such Jeffersonian concepts as religious freedom, the importance of a free press, public education, participation in government, and others. Meacham writes, "In an hour of twenty-first-century division and partisanship, of declining trust in institutions and of widespread skepticism about the long-term viability of the American experiment, it is instructive to return to first principles. Not, to be sure, as an exercise in nostalgia or as a flight from the reality of our own time, but as an honest effort to see, as Jefferson wrote, what history may be able to tell us about the present and the future."

What was it like for young black men growing up in a totally segregated environment and transitioning to an integrated one?" asks author Robert Jacobus in the preface to this collection of interviews. How did they get involved in sports? How did the facilities, both academic and athletic, compare to the white schools? What colleges recruited them out of high school? Searching for the answers to these and other questions, Jacobus interviewed some 250 former players, former coaches, and others who were personally involved in the racial integration of Texas public school and college athletic programs. Starting with Ben Kelly, the first African American to play for a college team in the former Confederacy when he walked on at then San Angelo College, and continuing with great players such as Jerry Levias, Ken Houston, Mel Renfro, Bubba Smith, and more, the players tell their stories in their own words. Each story is as varied as the players themselves. Some strongly uphold the necessity of integration for progress in society. Others, while understanding the need for integration, nevertheless mourn the passing of their segregated schools, remembering fondly the close-knit communities forged by the difficulties faced by both students and teachers. Interlaced with historical context and abundantly illustrated, the first-person accounts presented in Black Man in the Huddle form an important and lasting record of the thoughts, struggles, successes, and experiences of young men on the front lines of desegregation in Texas schools and athletic programs. By capturing these stories, Jacobus widens our perspective on the interactions between sport and American society during the momentous 1950s, '60s, and '70s.

Thomas Jefferson is still presented today as an enigmatic figure, despite being written about more than any other Founding Father. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom, even as he held people in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist and a simple-minded proponent of limited government. Now, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and leading Jefferson scholar team up to present an absorbing and revealing character study that finally clarifies the philosophy of Jefferson. The authors explore what they call the "empire" of Jefferson’s imagination—his expansive state of mind born of the intellectual influences and life experiences that led him into public life as a modern avatar of the enlightenment, who often likened himself to an ancient figure—"the most blessed of the patriarchs".

Thomas Jefferson is still presented today as an enigmatic figure, despite being written about more than any other Founding Father. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom, even as he held people in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist and a simple-minded proponent of limited government. Now, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and leading Jefferson scholar team up to present an absorbing and revealing character study that finally clarifies the philosophy of Jefferson. The authors explore what they call the “empire” of Jefferson’s imagination—his expansive state of mind born of the intellectual influences and life experiences that led him into public life as a modern avatar of the enlightenment, who often likened himself to an ancient figure—“the most blessed of the patriarchs”.

A New York Times bestseller, A Slave in the White House received glowing reviewsthatpraised its narrative and original research. It is the story of Paul Jennings, who was born into slavery on the plantation of James and Dolley Madison in Virginia and moved with the Madison household staff to the White House. Jennings was a self-taught and self-made man who purchased his own freedom and penned the first ever White House memoir. Nearly two centuries later, Montpelier scholar Elizabeth Dowling Taylor uncovered the memoir. In this amazing narrative she reconstructs his lifeand hisunusual portraits of James and Dolley Madison andSenator Daniel Websterin early nineteenth century Washington, as well as the 1812 assault on British troops and Jennings' heroic saving of George Washington's portrait. Fascinating and original, this is an important contribution to American history.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning historian recounts the tale of the unwanted president who ran afoul of Congress over Reconstruction and was nearly removed from office Andrew Johnson never expected to be president. But just six weeks after becoming Abraham Lincoln's vice president, the events at Ford's Theatre thrust him into the nation's highest office. Johnson faced a nearly impossible task--to succeed America's greatest chief executive, to bind the nation's wounds after the Civil War, and to work with a Congress controlled by the so-called Radical Republicans. Annette Gordon-Reed, one of America's leading historians of slavery, shows how ill-suited Johnson was for this daunting task. His vision of reconciliation abandoned the millions of former slaves (for whom he felt undisguised contempt) and antagonized congressional leaders, who tried to limit his powers and eventually impeached him. The climax of Johnson's presidency was his trial in the Senate and his acquittal by a single vote, which Gordon-Reed recounts with drama and palpable tension. Despite his victory, Johnson's term in office was a crucial missed opportunity; he failed the country at a pivotal moment, leaving America with problems that we are still trying to solve.

This epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826.

As a young college student in Atlanta, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. had a summer job driving a white banker around town. During the man's post-luncheon siestas, Jordan passed the time reading books, a fact that astounded his boss."Vernon can read!” the man exclaimed to his relatives. Nearly fifty years later, Vernon Jordan, now a senior executive at Lazard Freres, long-time civil rights leader, adviser and close friend to presidents and business leaders and one of the most charismatic figures in America, has written an unforgettable book about his life and times. The story of Vernon Jordan's life encompasses the sweeping struggles, changes, and dangers of African-American life in the civil rights revolution of the second half of the twentieth century.