![]() Gordon-Reed has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a MacArthur Fellow, and a fellow of the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center. ![]() ![]() (Sally Hemings herself was the child of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles, and an enslaved woman named Elizabeth Hemings.) That book won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the National Book Award. In The Hemingses of Monticello (2008), she reconstructs three generations of the Hemings family, whose lives and genealogies were intertwined with the Jeffersons’. If that first book showed Gordon-Reed’s willingness to kick against consensus, the next revealed the scope of her historical thinking and writing. The book touched off a fierce debate followed a year later by the DNA testing of male descendants in Jefferson’s family, the results of which proved her theories. ![]() In 1997, armed with only the analog tools of traditional historiography, she made a resounding case for the relationship in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Interviewed by John Jeremiah Sullivan Issue 238, Winter 2021Īnnette Gordon-Reed will always be most famous for having confirmed, beyond a reasonable doubt, the centuries-old rumors about Thomas Jefferson having had multiple children with a mixed-race woman named Sally Hemings, whom he owned. ![]()
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