Search results for ""Author Annette Gordon-Reed""

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.

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A ground-breaking historical work that explicates Thomas Jefferson's vision of himself, the American Revolution, Christianity, slavery and race.

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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.

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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.

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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".

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With a novelist’s skill and a scholar’s meticulous detail, Fawn M. Brodie portrays Thomas Jefferson as he wrestled with the great issues of his time: revolution, religion, power, race, and love—ambivalences that exerted a subtle but powerful influence on his political ideas and his presidency. Far advanced for its time, Brodie’s biography was the first to set forth a convincing case that Thomas Jefferson was the father of children by his slave Sally Hemings. In a new introduction, Annette Gordon-Reed, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello, explores the impact of Brodie’s groundbreaking book and explains why it is still such a powerful account of one of our greatest and most elusive presidents.

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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.

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