Faculty Bibliography
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Annette Gordon-Reed, Foreword, in Black Writers of the Founding Era (James G. Basker & Nicole Seary, 2023).
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In the 1960s, Annette Gordon-Reed was the first Black child to enroll in a white school in her hometown. Now she reflects on having a new school there named for her.
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An unflinching look at a beautiful, endangered, tourist-pummeled, and history-filled American city. At least thirteen million Americans will have to move away from American coasts in the coming decades, as rising sea levels and increasingly severe storms put lives at risk and cause billions of dollars in damages. In Charleston, South Carolina, denial, boosterism, widespread development, and public complacency about racial issues compound; the city, like our country, has no plan to protect its most vulnerable. In these pages, Susan Crawford tells the story of a city that has played a central role in America’s painful racial history for centuries and now, as the waters rise, stands at the intersection of climate and race. Unbeknownst to the seven million mostly white tourists who visit the charming streets of the lower peninsula each year, the Holy City is in a deeply precarious position. Weaving science, narrative history, and the family stories of Black Charlestonians, Charleston chronicles the tumultuous recent past in the life of the city–from protests to hurricanes–while revealing the escalating risk in its future. A bellwether for other towns and cities, Charleston is emblematic of vast portions of the American coast, with a future of inundation juxtaposed against little planning to ensure a thriving future for all residents. In Charleston, we meet Rev. Joseph Darby, a well-regarded Black minister with a powerful voice across the city and region who has an acute sense of the city’s shortcomings when it comes to matters of race and water. We also hear from Michelle Mapp, one of the city’s most promising Black leaders, and Quinetha Frasier, a charismatic young Black entrepreneur with Gullah-Geechee roots who fears her people’s displacement. And there is Jacob Lindsey, a young white city planner charged with running the city’s ten-year "comprehensive plan" efforts who ends up working for a private developer. These and others give voice to the extraordinary risks the city is facing. The city of Charleston, with its explosive gentrification over the last thirty years, crystallizes a human tendency to value development above all else. At the same time, Charleston stands for our need to change our ways–and the need to build higher, drier, more densely-connected places where all citizens can live safely. Illuminating and vividly rendered, Charleston is a clarion call and filled with characters who will stay in the reader’s mind long after the final page.
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In The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, Akhil Reed Amar writes of the parlous state of democracy in the United States. He argues that our problems are due, in part, to citizens’ failure to understand their responsibilities. The quality of our “constitutional conversation,” in which we talk about the nature of our government and our aspirations for it, is extremely poor. This is, in large measure, due to scholars’—historians’ and law professors’—unwillingness to create a “usable past” that would help Americans understand their duties to the country and to one another. He sees his book as a means of starting an enriched “constitutional conversion.” Along with his diagnosis of American malaise, Amar presents his own version of the origins of the Revolution (winding the clock back to 1760, before the more traditional starting period of 1763-1765), discusses the politically volatile 1790s, and creates portraits of the most well-known figures of that period. Amar’s presentation should start a vivid conversation about the nature of American civic life, past and present.
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Gordon-Reed reviews several books on Blacks history, including, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century edited by Whitney Baule-Baptiste and Brilt Rusert, Black Lives 1900: W.E.B. Du Boisat the Paris reposition edited by Julian Rothenstein, with an introduction by Jacqueline Francis and Stephen G. Hall, and A History of Data Visualization and Graphic Communication by Michael Friendly and Howard Wainer.
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Gordon-Reed explains that the story of Africans on this continent is longer and more varied than the version taught in school. The two origin stories that American children are most often taught are those of Jamestown VA, an English colony founded in 1607 as a moneymaking venture, and Plymouth MA, where people escaped religious persecution in 1620. The latter narrative is more inspirational and more in keeping with Americas sense of moral exceptionalism than the former, which is perhaps why it has tended to loom larger in the American mind. Both origin stories emphasize the triumph of amity over enmity between Indigenous people and English settlers, something very different from what actually happened. But Black people are absent in the story of Plymouth, and the role of Jamestown as a hub of chattel slavery is often minimized. For Black Americans, neither origin story is sufficient.
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The article looks at the story of Africans in North America which is longer and more varied that the version most people were taught in school. Topics discussed include the story of former slave and Moroccan explorer Estebanico, the role played by the Black people who came to the Americas with the Spanish in exploring Mexico, Central America and South America, and the reality of Black history of American history.
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Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus by Wilson Jeremiah Moses is reviewed.
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Interweaving American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed, the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, recounts the origins of Juneteenth and explores the legacies of the holiday that remain with us. From the earliest presence of black people in Texas—in the 1500s, well before enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown—to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced the end of slavery, Gordon-Reed’s insightful and inspiring essays present the saga of a “frontier” peopled by Native Americans, Anglos, Tejanos, and Blacks that became a slaveholder’s republic. Reworking the “Alamo” framework, Gordon-Reed shows that the slave-and race-based economy not only defined this fractious era of Texas independence, but precipitated the Mexican-American War and the resulting Civil War. A commemoration of Juneteenth and the fraught legacies of slavery that still persist, On Juneteenth is stark reminder that the fight for equality is ongoing.
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Racism in America has been the subject of serious scholarship for decades. At Harvard University Press, we’ve had the honor of publishing some of the most influential books on the subject.
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"Thomas Jefferson believed in the covenant between a government and its citizens, in both the government’s responsibilities to its people and also the people’s responsibility to the republic. In this illuminating book, a project of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, the #1 New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham presents selections from Jefferson’s writing on the subject, with an afterword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed and comments on Jefferson’s ideas from others, including Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Frederick Douglass, Carl Sagan, and American presidents. This curated collection revitalizes how to see an individual’s role in the world, as it explores such Jeffersonian concepts as religious freedom, the importance of a free press, public education, participation in government, and others. Meacham writes, “In an hour of twenty-first-century division and partisanship, of declining trust in institutions and of widespread skepticism about the long-term viability of the American experiment, it is instructive to return to first principles. Not, to be sure, as an exercise in nostalgia or as a flight from the reality of our own time, but as an honest effort to see, as Jefferson wrote, what history may be able to tell us about the present and the future.” -- Random House
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Annette Gordon-Reed, Foreword, in Robert D. Jacobus, Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the Integration of Texas Football (Texas A&M Univ. Press, 2019).
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The article examines U.S. President Andrew Johnson's impeachment hearings in 1868. It describes the impeachment proceedings initiated by the House of Representatives and the Senate against Johnson for violating the Tenure of Office Act and other offenses. It also discusses the actions taken by Johnson that indicated his hatred for African Americans and the political and social impact of his impeachment.
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Annette Gordon-Reed & Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson’s Bible Teaching, N.Y. Times, July 4, 2017, at A21.
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The article focuses on bible teaching of former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson according to which faith that no government should interfere in anyone's private religious belief and mentions how educating citizen to avoid violent disagreement over trivial doctrinal distinction could ensure peace.
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Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, the authors explore what they call the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination—an expansive state of mind born of his origins in a slave society, his intellectual influences, and the vaulting ambition that propelled him into public life as a modern avatar of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, likened himself to a figure of old—"the most blessed of the patriarchs." Indeed, Jefferson saw himself as a "patriarch," not just to his country and mountain-like home at Monticello but also to his family, the white half that he loved so publicly, as well as to the black side that he claimed to love, a contradiction of extraordinary historical magnitude. Divided into three sections, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs" reveals a striking personal dimension to his life. Part I, "Patriarch," explores Jeffersons's origins in Virgina; Part II, " 'Traveller,' " covers his five-year sojourn to Paris; and Part III, "Enthusiast," delves insightfully into the Virginian's views on Christianity, slavery, and race. We see not just his ideas and vision of America but come to know him in an almost familial way, such as through the importance of music in his life.
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On his tour through the United States in the 1830s Alexis de Tocqueville noted Americans' intense attachment to law. In their daily lives they used precepts, and styles of argumentation and decision-making that came directly from the legal system. It is no surprise, then, that enslaved people in the United States, as American as the people who claimed ownership over them, would also have law on their minds. In truth, they had every reason to think about it because law created and sustained the country's racially based slave system.
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This essay is a meditation on the role that biography can play in shaping our understanding of early American history. It grew out of a WMQ-EMSI workshop, “Early American Biographies,” convened at the Huntington Library in 2012. Workshop participants presented papers discussing lives from a broad cross section of North American society from the late seventeenth century to the early part of the nineteenth century. Gordon-Reed's essay discusses the mechanics of writing the biographies of obscure figures, gives a brief history of modern biography, and addresses criticism of biography as a form of history writing.
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This volume represents the first attempt to pull together Stanton’s most important writings on slavery at Monticello and beyond. Stanton’s pioneering work deepened our understanding of Jefferson without demonizing him.
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Chronicles the life of a former slave to James and Dolley Madison, tracing his early years on their plantation, his service in the White House household staff and post-emancipation achievements as a memoirist.