Books

Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

  • Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc.
  • Pub. Date: October 2008
  • ISBN-13: 9781400139750
  • Sales Rank: 179,899
  • Edition Description: Library ed.

    • Synopsis

    "Pathbreaking... and very moving" (Edmund S. Morgan) - the multigenerational story of Thomas Jefferson's hidden slave family.

    The Washington Post - Fergus M. Bordewich

    …monumental and original…Liberating the woman known to Jefferson's smirking enemies as "dusky Sally" from the lumber room of scandal and legend, Gordon-Reed leads her into the daylight of a country where slaves and masters met on intimate terms. In so doing, Gordon-Reed also shines an uncompromisingly fresh but not unsympathetic light on the most elusive of the Founding Fathers…In this magisterial book, she has succeeded not only in recovering the lives of an entire enslaved family, but also in showing them as creative agents intelligently maneuvering to achieve maximum advantage for themselves within the orbit of institutionalized slavery.

    Biography

    Annette 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.