"All the major currents of our history are found there," she said in an interview last month with The Harvard Gazette. In Gordon-Reed's new book, named for the holiday that commemorates when African Americans in Galveston first learned the news of legalized slavery's end in the United States, the celebrated historian weaves together American history and personal memoir to explore her early experiences in the segregationist South and to discuss how Texas "has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America," she has said. Place the code “AMINSP22” in the comments as you check out, and the book you receive in late June/early July will be signed by the author.Gordon-Reed, who has been called "one of the most important American historians of all time," has authored several groundbreaking and narrative-shifting books on history, including Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, where Gordon-Reed showed that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved - and the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-wining follow-up to that book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, that detailed the lives of Hemings and her children. In On Juneteenth she writes, “it is staggering that there is no date commemorating the end of slavery in the United States.” Yet Texas, the last state to free its slaves, has long acknowledged the date of June 19, 1865, when US Major General Gordon Granger proclaimed from his Galveston headquarters that slavery was no longer the law of the land. Don’t miss Gordon-Reed’s discussion with Lisa Baldez about her research process, her childhood in Texas, and the circuitous path to national recognition of the Juneteenth holiday.Ĭopies of On Juneteenth can be purchased from our partners at Porter Square Books at this dedicated url. The Texas native combines her own scholarship with a personal and intimate reflection of an overlooked holiday that has suddenly taken on new significance. On Juneteenth presents the saga of a frontier defined as much by the slave plantation owner as the mythic cowboy, rancher, or oilman.Ĭelebrated for her research and revelations in her prize-winning book The Hemingses of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed now tells a tale closer to home. Moderated by Lisa Baldez, Professor of Government, Dartmouth Collegeįor this Pulitzer and National Book Award-winning historian, also a proud Texas native and descendant of Texas slaves, the story of Juneteenth has special resonance.
Watch now on the GBH Forum Network website Presented in partnership with the Boston Public Library, the State Library of Massachusetts, and GBH Forum Network
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