Gordon-Reed, in your recent memoir “On Juneteenth,” you provide essential context to the Juneteenth holiday as it has evolved into a central theme of our difficult and necessary national conversation. You also are an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society.ĭr. Among other honors that have confirmed your prestigious standing among history’s finest scholars are the National Humanities Medal awarded to you by President Barack Obama, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. The many awards earned by “The Hemingses of Monticello,” including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award for nonfiction, are a testament to how your work has decoded the ways in which history is shaped and how new information must compel us to reconsider popular narratives. Thanks to your tireless investigation, and by giving a platform to those whose accounts had routinely been dismissed by scholars, you exposed how historians risk being misguided by their own biases and cautioned us against contorting evidence to preserve our preexisting opinions of significant historical figures. Gordon-Reed, you have done momentous work to recover the stories of enslaved Africans, especially through your books “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” and “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.” Through your exhaustive research and engrossing prose, you revived national interest in the complex and proud Hemings family whose blood ties to Thomas Jefferson - supported through DNA analysis - had long been the source of conjecture and debate.

Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and a leading voice on the history of race in America.ĭr. the hemmings is or about jefferson as a whole or monticello.Mr. and of course, that's what baldwin baldwin did but this writing this essay that i thought about doing was much more in line with that than the kind of thing that i did in writing about. well, the story is people say that if you're born in texas or are places if you want to be a writer you aspire to that you run off to new york people born in new york run off to paris. regionals, you know screenplay maybe moving to paris or something like that.

i always wanted to be a writer i never thought of myself as a historian i thought of myself as a writer i wanted to do that kind of work that would reach as large a number of people as possible and that would be much more personal i would think of myself as something like a james baldwin, you know, for example, writing novels and plays. Still may do but a book that was much more personal and which i did the kind of writing that i did when i was growing up.

On juneteenth gordon reed