“I find it hard to believe that would have just a purely sexual relationship with someone over the course of 38 years, and have seven children with her,” Gordon-Reed said. She has heard it at most every event she’s attended since she wrote “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy,” about Jefferson’s relationship with his slave and the way scholars have treated it. Pforzheimer Professor with the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and a history professor with the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. It’s a familiar question for Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Carol K. Gordon-Reed is presently at work on a second volume about the Hemings family that will take them into the 19 th and early 20 th Centuries.Speaking to a crowd at the Harvard Allston Education Portal, Professor Annette Gordon-Reed smiled when an audience member asked: Did Thomas Jefferson love Sally Hemings?

Most recently she released “Most Blessed of Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination (with Peter S. Several of her other publications include: Race on Trail: Law and Justice in American History (2002), and The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which received the 2009 Pulitzer prize in History, the National Book Award, and fifteen other awards. Gordon-Reed’s writing and historical research changed scholarship surrounding this controversial topic and the validity of Gordon Reed’s claims were supported later in 1998 by DNA evidence. Her research for the book utilized historical analysis, manuscripts, and studies of Jefferson’s life to critique the way previous historians had handled the question of Jefferson and Hemings, coming to the conclusion that it was likely that the pair had children together.

Pforzheimer Professor for the Radcliffe Institute for Advance Study, and Professor of History, Faculty of Arts & Sciences.Ī prolific writer, Professor Gordon-Reed’s book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An America Controversy, received much public attention in 1997. Gordon-Reed holds several titles at Harvard University including: Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Carol K. Gordon-Reed’s most renowned writings have focused on the relationship between the Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a woman enslaved at Monticello, as well as on three generations of the Hemings family.

Gordon-Reed’s Jefferson lecture will focus on Thomas Jefferson’s vision for the United States of America, and how race and slavery complicated his views of what kind of society was possible on the American continent.

Annette gordon reed thomas jefferson