2009 Mark Lynton History Prize Finalist |
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Annette Gordon-Reed Judges’ CitationAnnette Gordon-Reed's extraordinary achievement in The Hemingses of Monticello is to have produced a work about American slavery and the history of one slave family which is both a monumental feat of archival scholarship and an often heartbreakingly intimate domestic drama. Her narrative exploration of the lives and tangled blood lines of the Hemingses and the Jeffersons, from the birth of Elizabeth, the Hemings matriarch, in 1735, to the death of Thomas Jefferson in 1826, is unblinking yet still deeply compassionate in its vivid depiction of the complex relationships that slavery engendered. Gordon-Reed brings to the well-trammeled territory of Jefferson scholarship a wealth of bracing new detail, while at the same time creating, in a single, highly accessible volume, what is perhaps the most revealing and complete history of an American slave family ever written. (Citation by Patrick O'Keefe) BioAnnette Gordon-Reed is a professor of law at New York Law School and a professor of history at Rutgers University. She is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. She lives in New York City. Judges for the Mark Lynton History Prize WinnerRichard Bernstein, Maya Jasanoff and Patrick Keefe. 2009 Lukas Prize Winners
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