Pulitzer Prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed to speak at the Huntington

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and author Annette Gordon-Reed will talk about her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family in a lecture at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. In a presentation titled “Writing the Life of an Enslaved Family,” she will discuss the task of incorporating the life histories of African American slaves into the narrative of the founding era. The event takes place in Friends’ Hall on April 28 at 7:30 p.m. and is free to the public.

Gordon-Reed, professor of law at New York Law School and professor of history at Rutgers University, is the featured speaker for The Huntington’s annual Allan Nevins Lecture. Last year the Pulitzer board called her book “a painstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave family that casts provocative new light on the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson.” The book was published by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
In a review in the New Republic, noted historian Gordon Wood wrote of Gordon-Reed: “With great historical imagination, she has done far more than put together a convincing case for the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. She has also reconstructed the complicated and intimate relations between black and white families in Jefferson’s household over several generations. And perhaps most important, she has uncovered the many expressions of humanity by both blacks and whites existing within a fundamentally inhumane institution.”

The Nevins Lecture was created as a tribute to former Huntington research associate Allan Nevins and is given annually in a subject of 19th-century American history.

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The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens is a collections-based research and educational institution serving scholars and the general public.

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