Annette Gordon-Reed

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently....

Fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reassured the nation from his deathbed, “Thomas Jefferson survives.” Unaware that Jefferson had died mere hours earlier, Adams was in a larger sense correct: Jefferson had been immortalized in the American imagination.

When Annette Gordon-Reed's groundbreaking study was first published, rumors of Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings had circulated for two centuries. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings intensified this debate by identifying glaring inconsistencies....

From the New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hemingses of Monticello comes a groundbreaking collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings on race.