Annette Gordon-Reed

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study has announced its fellows for 2015-2016. The more than 50 men and women include creative artists, humanists, scientists, and social scientists, each pursuing “an ambitious individual project within the Institute’s multidisciplinary community.”...Twelve of the new fellows are Harvard faculty members; their names and the titles of their projects appear below....Christine A. Desan, professor of law, whose teaching covers the international monetary system, the constitutional law of money, constitutional history, political economy, and legal theory. She is the co-founder of Harvard’s Program on the Study of Capitalism...Annette Gordon-Reed, professor of law and of history, Pforzheimer professor at the Radcliffe Institute, whose 2008 book The Hemingses of Monticello won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for nonfiction...Intisar A. Rabb, professor of law and director of Harvard Law School’s Islamic Legal Studies Program, who studies criminal law, legislation and theories of statutory interpretation, and Islamic law.

Loretta E. Lynch, who was confirmed Thursday as attorney general, will meet with local police officers nationwide this summer as she tries to strike a new tone for the Justice Department amid a roiling controversy over the use of lethal force, aides said....But her friends and relatives say she has never viewed her job in government as one of a civil rights advocate. “She’s not an ideologue,” Annette Gordon-Reed, a Harvard law professor and longtime friend, said recently. “She’s not going to do things to please some wing. She’s not a caricature of anything. She is a prosecutor.”

The Rev. Lorenzo Lynch was in his living room here, surrounded by photographs of his daughter Loretta, when he first heard the news that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was stepping down and she was on the short list of candidates to replace him...When she graduated law school, Lynch and another Harvard student, Annette Gordon-Reed, both joined the Wall Street law firm Cahill Gordon & Reindel as litigation associates. They and another African American woman at the firm called themselves “the triplets” and worked brutal hours. “We often found ourselves sitting in a conference room at 3:00 in the morning eating Chinese food and working on a case,” said Gordon-Reed, now a Harvard law professor. “She’s a Southern steel-magnolia-type person — very, very strong,” Gordon-Reed said. “But she’s also one of the funniest people I know and a good mimic.

Harry Belafonte, an icon of American stage and screen with a lifelong commitment to social activism, recalled his experiences during the civil rights movement at a Chancellor’s Lecture Series event Jan. 13 in Langford Auditorium. Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos and award-winning historians Annette Gordon-Reed and Michael Beschloss joined Belafonte for a far-reaching conversation on the history, legality and politics surrounding the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which marks its 50th anniversary this year...Black legal scholars began assembling cases, including 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education, to chip away at segregationist laws and usher in the sweeping social legislation of the 1960s. “But law always has its limitations, so direct action comes in and helps,” Gordon-Reed said. “Law legitimizes things, but they both have to work together.”

New York asked more than 50 historians to respond to a broad questionnaire about how Obama and his administration will be viewed 20 years from now..."The president’s blackness will matter a great deal, mainly because I think it shaped how many Americans viewed him and gave ammunition to his opposition. And on the other hand, I think Obama’s being black will influence the way that young people see the world. Having a black family living in the White House is important symbolically, as it suggests that the United States is not a “white” nation." – Annette Gordon-Reed

Annette Gordon-Reed, a law professor at Harvard University and scholar on race, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history for "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family." ... Last week, I had an e-mail exchange with her about race relations in the U.S. after the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri.

An op-ed by Annette Gordon-Reed. For a founding father who usually took a sunny view of his nation’s prospects, it was a darkly pessimistic prophesy. In his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson argued that if – as he hoped – America’s black slaves were one day set free, the result would be conflict and an inevitable descent into racial war. And in the hours after Governor Jay Nixon imposed a night-time curfew on the Missouri town of Ferguson following the killing there of an unarmed teenager by a police officer earlier this month, it is indeed reasonable to wonder whether a form of war (sometimes hot, sometimes cold) has been waged against blacks in America from Jefferson’s time until our own.

The Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and the Carol Pforzheimer Professor of Advanced Studies at the Radcliffe Institute, Annette Gordon-Reed has become the authority not only on the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings relationship but also on the legacy, sensibility, and politics of our brilliant yet hypocritical third president…who owned more than 100 slaves when he declared all men to be equal…My guest is now exploring the more up-to-date lineage of the Hemings family. She then plans a biography of Jefferson that will illuminate his life as a slaveholder. As cases of sexual scandal ensnaring our elected officials persist, Gordon-Reed’s investigative lens is ever relevant, as is her illumination of America’s moral complexity.

A book review by Annette Gordon-Reed. Few if any men were ever better qualified, at least on paper, to serve as president of the United States than John Quincy Adams. A diplomat several times over, lawyer, senator, and secretary of state, he had grown up in a household with parents who had been center stage at the creation of the American union. By example and exhortation, John and Abigail Adams instilled in their precocious and talented son a deep faith in, and enthusiasm for, the American experiment.

Harvard Law School Professor Annette Gordon Reed ’84 -- a recipient of the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Pulitzer Prize in History, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, The Dorothy And Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship, and a National Humanities Medal -- has been appointed to the Charles Warren Professorship of American Legal History.

Annette Gordon-Reed ’84 was awarded the National Humanities Medal in February for her significant and innovative research on Thomas Jefferson’s slaves and the life of Sally Hemings, and for illuminating a chapter in American history that had previously been given little recognition.

The Green Bag, a quarterly journal devoted to readable, concise, and entertaining legal scholarship, has named a number of HLS faculty members and alumni to its “Exemplary Legal Writing 2009” list.