Author Talk with Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf

Join Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf to discuss their new co-authored book “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.” The book delves into Jefferson’s formative experiences that shaped his character and helped determine his life as a revolutionary, statesman, planter, and father. According to the New York Times review: “To the already bursting Jefferson canon, they add a fresh and layered analysis, one centered more on his interior life than his deeds for posterity.”

Gordon-Reed is known for her persistent investigation into the life of Thomas Jefferson as iconic American president. Her work has dramatically changed the course of Jeffersonian scholarship and in disentangling the complicated history of two distinct founding families’ interracial bloodlines, she offers an authentic portrayal of our colonial past. Her previous books include “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” in 1997, and “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and currently the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and the Woman of Power & Influence Award from the National Organization for Women in New York City. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus, at the University of Virginia. Onuf is also Senior Fellow at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies.  A leading scholar of Jefferson and the early American republic, he is the author, co-author, and editor of numerous books including (as author) “Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood” (2001), “The Mind of Thomas Jefferson” (2007), and (as editor) “Jeffersonian Legacies” (1993).  He is also a co-host (with Brian Balogh and Edward Ayers) of the weekly public radio program and podcast Backstory with the American History Guys.

Presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.