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.
[...] In her new book Gordon-Reed has not abandoned her incisive legal approach to evidence, but here she has essentially become a historian, and a superb one. She has set out to do what she thinks professional historians should have been doing all along. With great historical imagination, she has done far more than put together a convincing case for the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. She has also reconstructed the complicated and intimate relations between black and white families in And perhaps most important, she has uncovered the many expressions of humanity by both blacks and whites existing within a fundamentally inhumane institution. ...the magisterial The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family... Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement, Christmas Roundup 2008 The Hemingses of Monticello marks the author as one of the most astute, insightful, and forthright historians of this generation. The New York Review of Books [A] commanding and important book. The New Yorker