Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed is a historian and legal scholar who teaches at Harvard University, where she is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and a professor of history. Her work focuses on Thomas Jefferson, slavery and the lives of the people Jefferson enslaved, as well as on law and race in American history.

Her first book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), examined how historians had handled the evidence of the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), a history of several generations of the Hemings family, won the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Her other books include a biography of President Andrew Johnson, a study of Jefferson's ideas written with Peter S. Onuf, and On Juneteenth (2021), which blends history with reflections on growing up in Texas.

Her books bring the lives of enslaved people into the center of the story of the nation's founding.