The Historian

ANNETTE GORDON-REED'81 earns National Book Award for her revealing Jefferson

What a difference a DNA test and a decade make. When New York Law School professor Gordon-Reed published Thomas Jefferson and SallyHemings: An American Controversy in 1997, the legal scholar courted controversy with her exhaustively researched argument supporting a sexual liaison between Jefferson and one of his slaves, who also happened to be his wife's half-sister. That same year renowned historian Joseph Ellis won the National Book Award for a Jefferson biography in which he asserted that the pair did not have sexual relations.

A year later, however, an independent DNA study was published in Nature that effectively proved Jefferson fathered at least one of Hemings' children, bolstering Gordon-Reed's case and making historians reevaluate their long-held views on the author of the Declaration of Independence. A decade later, in November 2008, Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for her follow-up, The Hemingses ofMonticello: An American Family. The National Book Foundation called the 608-page tome the "most important history of an American slave family ever written."

Gordon-Reed combed through Jefferson's records at Monticello, and recreated an intimate, nuanced portrait of the family. "It doesn't change the fact that slavery was an evil institution," she says, "but you see it personally instead of symbolically."

Historian Edmund S. Morgan wrote in The New York Review ofBooks last October that The Hemingses "marks the author as one of the most astute, insightful and forthright historians of this generation." It's a title she relishes. "I majored in history at Dartmouth but I didn't get a Ph.D.," says Gordon-Reed, who is also a history professor at Rutgers- Newark and lives in New York City with her husband, a civil court judge, and their teenage son and daughter. "I went to [Harvard] law school because it seemed the practical thing to do. So considering that I'm a law professor/historian, it's very gratifying to get this kind of recognition."