Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, She is a legal scholar and historian whose persistent investigation into the life of an iconic American president has dramatically changed the course of Jeffersonian scholarship.
Fascinated from childhood by the Jefferson family, Gordon-Reed began a comprehensive re-examination of the evidence about the rumored committed relationship between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings .In 1997, she wrote her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. While the liaison had been widely alleged contemporaneously and since, it was also largely dismissed, then and later, by archivists and historians.
Although she is not a formally trained historian, Gordon-Reed drew on her legal training to apply context and reasonable interpretation to the sparse documentation about the shared lives of her protagonists at Monticello, in London, and in Paris.
She identified a set of unexamined assumptions that had governed many Jefferson scholars’ investigations. These assumptions were that white people tell the truth, black people lie, slave owners tell the truth, and slaves lie. Gordon-Reed cross-checked the versions of events provided by former Monticello slaves and Isaac Jefferson, who confirmed Thomas Jefferson’s paternity of the Hemings children.
After publication, An American Controversy was received skeptically by some, but her conclusions were confirmed in 1998 when DNA evidence supported the documentary evidence of Jefferson’s genetic paternity.
Gordon-Reed continued her inquiry into colonial interracial relations in The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which follows the Hemings family through the nineteenth century and along markedly different paths of racial assimilation and integration. In disentangling the complicated history of two distinct founding families’ interracial bloodlines, Gordon-Reed is shaping and enriching American history with an authentic portrayal of our colonial past.
Gordon-Reed was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for History, for her 2008 work on the Hemings family.
Gordon-Reed’s most recent book, Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series—The 17th President, 1865-1869 (2011) examines Johnson and his historical reputation. She notes that he did not favor integration of the freedmen into America’s mainstream and caused the delay of their full emancipation.
On February 25, 2010, President Barack Obama honored Annette Gordon-Reed with the National Humanities Medal, the highest national honor for leaders in the arts and humanities.
Annette Gordon-Reed received an A.B. (1981) from Dartmouth College and a J.D. (1984) from Harvard Law School. In 2010, she joined the faculty of Harvard Law School, with joint appointments as Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.