| Annette Gordon-Reed | |
|---|---|
 Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University, presents the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for History to Annette Gordon-Reed. |
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| Born | November 19, 1958 Conroe, Texas, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Dartmouth College Harvard Law School |
| Occupation | Law Professor Author |
| Employer | New York Law School; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey |
| Known for | American Legal History, American Slavery and the Law |
| Spouse(s) | Judge Robert Reed |
| Website Faculty page for Annette Gordon-Reed at New York Law School |
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Annette Gordon-Reed (born November 19, 1958 in Conroe, Texas) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and law professor. Gordon-Reed was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School and is now the Wallace Stevens professor of law at New York Law School and a Board of Governors professor of history at Rutgers University, Newark.[1][2]
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Background and education
Gordon-Reed was born November 19, 1958, in Conroe, Texas, to Betty Jean Gordon and Alfred Gordon. She became interested in Thomas Jefferson in elementary school after reading a children’s biography of him, narrated by a fictional slave boy. At fourteen, she joined the Book-of-the-Month Club (concealing her status as a minor) to receive Fawn Brodie’s biography, Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate Portrait. She continued her study of Jefferson’s life at Dartmouth College, where she majored in History, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1981. She attended Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Law Review, and graduated in 1984.[3]
Personal life
Annette Gordon-Reed is married to Robert Reed, a civil court judge in the Bronx, whom she met while at Harvard Law School. She lives on the Upper West Side with her husband and two children, a teenage son, Gordon, and a daughter, Susan, a student at Harvard.[4]
Professional and academic career
Gordon-Reed spent her early career as an associate at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, and as Counsel to the New York City Board of Corrections. She speaks or moderates at numerous conferences across the country on history and law-related topics. She has been a professor at New York Law School since 1992 and began teaching undergraduate and graduate-level courses in American History and American Studies at Rutgers-Newark in the spring 2007 semester.[5][6]
Her first book, published in 1997, was the critically acclaimed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. The book sparked a great amount of interest from fellow scholars as it investigated the long-standing historical controversy over whether Thomas Jefferson had had a sexual relationship with his female slave Sally Hemings and fathered children by her. Previous scholarship had fallen into an unbridgeable dichotomy between those who believed in the Hemings-Jefferson liaison and those who regarded it as a false charge intended by Jefferson's critics to besmirch him and to damage his historical reputation. Gordon-Reed isolated a set of unexamined assumptions that had governed many Jefferson scholars' investigation of the matter. These assumptions were that white people tell the truth, black people lie, slaveowners tell the truth, and slaves lie. Gordon-Reed proposed to reverse these assumptions and then cross-check the versions of events provided by slaves such as Madison Hemings and Isaac Jefferson against historical evidence to which they could not have had access. The fit between that evidence and those testimonies, supplemented by similar cross-checking of oral traditions among Hemings descendants with primary sources such as Jefferson's papers and agricultural records, led to the conclusion that Jefferson and Hemings did have some sort of intimate sexual relationship, though it is difficult if not impossible to establish that relationship's character. Nearly one year after her book was published; DNA analysis corroborated the link between Jefferson and Hemings.[7]
Current activities
Building on her earlier study, she wrote the first of two planned volumes of a history of the Hemings family. The first, which appeared in 2008, was The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. This book won the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction, the 2008 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic Book Award, the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history, the 2009 George Washington Book Prize, a 2009 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the 2009 New Jersey Council of the Humanities Book Award, and the 2009 Frederick Douglass Book Prize. It was also a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography and the 2009 Mark Lynton History Prize.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]
Annette Gordon-Reed is the first person of African-American descent to win the Pulitzer Prize in history.[17]
In addition to the awards listed above, Gordon-Reed has received a Guggenheim Fellowship for Monticello Legacies in the New Age, 2009; a Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Vernon Can Read!, 2002; a Trailblazer Award, Metropolitan Black Bar Association, 2002; Best Nonfiction Book for 2001, Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She was Columbia University’s Barbara A. Black Lecturer, 2001; and won a Bridging the Gap Award for fostering racial reconciliation, 2000.
Bibliography
- 2002 - Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History
- 1997 - Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (reprint with new foreword discussiong DNA evidence, 1999)
- 2008 - The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family
- 2001 - Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir (with Vernon Eulion Jordan)
- 2008 - Make It Plain: Standing Up and Speaking Out (with Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Lee A. Daniels)
- 2000 - Slavery and the American South: Essays and Commentaries
- 2008 - Andrew Johnson: The American Presidents Series—The 17th President, 1865-1869 (with Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Lee A. Daniels)
References
- ^ Faculty page at New York Law School
- ^ Faculty page at Rutgers University in Newark
- ^ Annette Gordon-Reed. New York Law School Bio.[1].
- ^ Only a Brief Pause for Rest. New York Times.[2].
- ^ New York Law School. Ibid
- ^ Faculty page at Rutgers University in Newark
- ^ Annette Gordon-Reed: Rutgers-Newark Appoints Nationally Renowned Presidential Scholar to Faculty. History News Network.[3].
- ^ A Lawyer’s New Jefferson Memorial The next chapter in the Hemings saga By Jennie Yabroff | NEWSWEEK
- ^ [4]
- ^ Rutgers-Newark prof Annette Gordon-Reed wins Pulitzer Prize
- ^ New York Law School Professor Wins $25,000 Frederick Douglass Book Prize
- ^ 2009 George Washington Book Prize Awarded at Mount Vernon
- ^ [5]
- ^ [6]
- ^ 2008 NBCC Finalists Announced By | Barbara Hoffert
- ^ [7]
- ^ Pulitzer Prize for Drama Honors Play about Women in Wartime Congo: Biography, Fiction, History, Music, Nonfiction, Poetry Winners Also Named By | Michael Bandler
External links
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