Annette Gordon-Reed

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Annette Gordon Reed (2011)

Annette Gordon-Reed (born Annette Gordon ; born November 19, 1958 in Livingston , Texas ) is an American historian and legal scholar . She gained fame through her various studies on Thomas Jefferson and his relationship with Sally Hemings and their children. She was the first African American woman to receive the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for History .

Life

Annette Gordon-Reed was born on November 19, 1958 in Livingston, Texas to Alfred Gordon and his wife Bettye Jean. As a student in elementary school, she began to be interested in Thomas Jefferson. She graduated from Dartmouth College in 1981 and graduated from Harvard Law School in 1984 , where she was a member of the Harvard Law Review team .

Gordon-Reed began her professional career as an attorney with the law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel and as a legal advisor to the New York City Board of Corrections . From 1992 to 2010 she was Wallace Stevens Professor of Law at New York Law School and from 2007 to 2010 Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University in Newark . Gordon-Reed has been Professor of Law and History at Harvard since 2010, where she holds the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professorship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study . She has spoken and hosted numerous historical and legal conferences across the United States.

In 2009 she received the Pulitzer Prize for History and 15 other awards for her work The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family . In the same year she was awarded the National Humanities Medal and was made a MacArthur Fellow the following year .

Annette Gordon-Reed is married to Robert Reed, a civil judge in the Bronx whom she met while studying at Harvard. The couple now live on the Upper West Side of New York with their two children, Gordon and Susan .

Work on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings

Gordon-Reed's first book, 1997, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy , aroused great interest among experts as it examined the long-running historical controversy of whether Thomas Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings , and whether he was a father attributable to their children.

Historical status quo of the Jefferson / Hemings relationship

Most historians had accepted the descendants' denials and their assertion that Jefferson's nephew Peter Carr was the father of Heming's children. This account had been adopted by Jefferson's biographer James Parton and subsequent historians for more than a hundred years.

When some historians researched Jefferson again in the late twentieth century, his defenders reacted as if attributions to his fatherhood were intended to damage his historical reputation, despite the by then widespread recognition of cross-racial relationships in Jefferson's time. The President was an icon as one of the Founding Fathers of the United States . In the mid-1970s, Fawn McKay Brodie wrote the first biography on Jefferson that seriously investigated evidence of a connection to Sally Hemings. She thought a relationship between Hemings and Jefferson was likely.

Analysis by Gordon-Reed

Gordon-Reed “drew on her legal training to apply it to the wording and a meaningful interpretation of the sparse sources,” and she also analyzed the historiography.

Gordon-Reed identified a number of unverified assumptions that had guided the study of Jefferson by many historians. These assumptions were that whites are telling the truth and blacks are lying, and that slave owners are also telling the truth, whereas slaves are lying. Gordon-Reed subjected the accounts of incidents from former Monticello slaves, such as that of Madison Hemings, who claimed that Jefferson was his father, and that of Isaak Jefferson, who confirmed the paternity of Thomas Jefferson for the Hemings children , a review with traditional historical evidence to which they could not have had access. At the same time, she checked the oral records of the Hemings descendants with primary sources such as Jefferson's writings and agricultural records. She pointed out errors made by historians and noted facts which had been overlooked by Jefferson's white descendants and historians and which contradicted their claims that Jefferson's nephew Carr fathered the children. As noted by historian Winthrop Jordan and published by Brodie, Dumas Malone's records show that Jefferson was in Monticello every time Hemings became pregnant, but she never became pregnant when he was not there. Gordon-Reed noted that all of Sally Hemings' children were released, as Jefferson had promised, according to Madison's report. Her analysis led her to conclude that Jefferson and Hemings had an intimate sexual relationship, although she did not attempt to characterize it.

Honors and awards (selection)

Gordon-Reed was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for History; she got it in 2008 for her work through the Hemings family. She received 15 other awards for this book.
The literary critic Christopher Hitchens described her analysis in the online magazine Slate as "brilliant".

2008

2009

2010

2011

2019

Fonts (selection)

Web links

Commons : Annette Gordon-Reed  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jennie Yabroff: Annette Gordon-Reed on the Sally Hemings Saga . Newsweek . October 3, 2008. Retrieved March 15, 2014.
  2. ^ A b Annette Gordon-Reed '84 to join the Harvard faculty , in: Recent News and Spotlights der Harvard Law School of April 30, 2010.
  3. ↑ a b Annette Gordon-Reed , on the MacArthur Foundation website .
  4. ^ "Only a Brief Pause for Rest" , in: New York Times, June 28, 2009.
  5. ↑ Michael Bandler, "Pulitzer Prize for Drama Honors Play about Women in Wartime Congo: Biography, Fiction, History, Music, Nonfiction, Poetry Winners Also Named"
  6. ↑ a b "Rutgers-Newark prof Annette Gordon-Reed wins Pulitzer Prize"
  7. ^ "History" , Past winners & finalists by category , The Pulitzer Prizes. Retrieved March 24, 2012.
  8. ↑ 2008 NBCC Finalists Announced
  9. ↑ http://www.journalism.columbia.edu/cs/ContentServer/jrn/1175372505012/page/1212611046533/simplepage.htm (link not available)
  10. ^ "National Book Awards - 2008" . National Book Foundation . Retrieved March 24, 2012
    (With acceptance speech by Gordon-Reed and interview.)
  11. ^ "2009 George Washington Book Prize Awarded at Mount Vernon"
  12. ^ Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards :: 2006 Winners . Anisfield-wolf.org. Archived from the original on August 23, 2010. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
  13. ↑ Awards - NJCH Annual Book Award . NJCH. Archived from the original on November 25, 2010. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
  14. ^ "New York Law School Professor Wins $ 25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize" ( Memento of March 29, 2010 on the Internet Archive )
  15. ^ A b Library of Virginia Literary Award | WW Norton & Company . Books.wwnorton.com. Retrieved September 11, 2010.
  16. ^ Post Store: Obama honors leaders in arts and humanities , washingtonpost.com. February 26, 2010. Retrieved September 11, 2010. 
personal data
SURNAME Gordon-Reed, Annette
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gordon, Annette (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian and legal scholar
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Livingston , Texas