Mon 6/13 @ 7PM
Annette Gordon-Reed is a professor of history at Harvard University and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author for her 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, about the descendents of the Hemings family, slaves who lived in Thomas Jefferson’s plantation. She had tackled a related subject earlier in her 1997 book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, addressing the issue of whether Jefferson had fathered his slave Sally Hemings children.
Since then, she wrote about Andrew Jackson and another book about Jefferson, and most recently, 2021’s On Juneteenth. In that book, she looks at the significance to Black Americans of celebrating this day, when the last of the slaves in Texas finally learned they were free, and what it meant to them through the years of reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement.
She’ll be doing a live virtual author talk for the Hudson Library & Historical Society, a one-time event that won’t be recorded. It’s free but you must register here.
Copies of Gordon-Reed’s new book will be available for purchase through Hudson’s Learned Owl Book Shop.