Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Annette Gordon-Reed to Give Lecture

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed will give a lecture and sign copies of her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln March 4. Her lecture, "Writing the History of an Enslaved Family: Monticello in the American Imagination," will be 7:30 p.m. March 4 at the Sheldon Museum of Art's Ethel S. Abbott Auditorium, 12th and R streets.

Gordon-Reed has joint appointments at the New York Law School and the Newark Campus of Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on race and the law. She is a leading historian of the African-American experience. Her first monograph, "Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy," is an intensive examination of how Jefferson's many biographers have presented evidence of his rumored affair with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, by whom he was said to have fathered several children. While Gordon-Reed did not take a definitive stand on whether or not the two had a romantic relationship, she came to strongly suspect that indeed there was such a liaison. more....