Episode 002: Family, Race, and Memoir with Annette Gordon-Reed
In the quiet hours before dawn, a pregnant young woman named Sally Hemings prepared to leave Paris. She was just sixteen. For nearly two years, she had lived in the bustling French capital as an enslaved worker in Thomas Jefferson's household. In France, slavery was illegal. She could have stayed. She could have claimed her freedom. But she didn't. Instead, she negotiated not for herself, but for her future children, who would be born enslaved but, under the terms of her understanding with Jefferson, would be freed upon his death.
Sally Hemings was an enslaved worker. She was also the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. Their children would be born into a world that refused to recognize them fully, as kin, as citizens, as free. Yet they were a family. Complicated, hidden, and shaped by power, but a family nonetheless. Annette Gordon-Reed's The Hemingses of Monticello tells this story with extraordinary care, revealing how the lives of one Black family were entangled with one of America's most revered founders. Today, we explore what their story teaches us about race, kinship, and the meaning of family under slavery, and how family history can uncover truths that challenge the myths we inherit.
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Listen on Apple Podcasts: LINK
Listen on Spotify: LINK
Follow us on Instagram
TODAY'S GUEST
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard, widely recognized as one of the most influential historians of early America. She is the author of The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008), which won the Pulitzer Prize in History and the National Book Award, among sixteen other honors. Her work has reshaped the historical understanding of Thomas Jefferson, slavery, and family in the early republic.
Gordon-Reed’s scholarship spans books, essays, and collaborations. Her publications include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir with Vernon Jordan (2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (2002), Andrew Johnson (2010), and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016). Her most recent book, On Juneteenth (2021), blends history and memoir to explore the origins and meaning of the holiday.
She has held distinguished appointments, including the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professorship at Oxford and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professorship at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. Gordon-Reed served as president of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic and is currently president of the Ames Foundation. Her honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
Beyond her scholarship, Gordon-Reed has contributed to public conversations about history and law, serving on boards and commissions and writing widely for general audiences. Her work continues to shape how Americans understand race, rights, and the legacies of the past.
SHOW NOTES
- Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2009).
- Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University of Virginia Press, 1998).
- Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth (Liveright, 2021).
- Getting Word: African American History at Monticello
- Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (Penguin, 1969).
- Lucia C. Stanton, “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello (University of Virginia Press, 2012).
- Caleb Gayle, Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State (Riverhead, 2025).
