Academic

National Book Award - Overdue

By Sherrilyn Ifill

     I was thrilled to learn this week that law professor Annette Gordon-Reed is the winner of the 2008 National Book Award for non-fiction for her work, The Hemingses of Monticello:  An American Family. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/books/20awards.html?scp=2&sq=Annette%20Gordon-Reed&st=cse This book is the second treatment in Gordon-Reed’s exhaustive and authoritative research on the relationship between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, with whom he most certainly had a long sexual relationship and several children.  The real story here is that Gordon-Reed’s first book on the Jefferson/Hemings alliance, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:  An American Controversy, was every bit as excellent as The Hemingses.  When it was published though, the historian-keepers of Jefferson’s sanitized history were not yet ready to accept Reeds findings and conclusions, and – as a particularly trenchant review of Gordon-Reed’s book in September’s New Yorker explores — were in fact affirmatively unwilling to take the logical analytical steps routinely used in historical research to come to the conclusions that Gordon-Reed does in her work.  http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2008/09/22/080922crbo_books_lepore  In the same year that Gordon-Reed’s first book was published, the National Book Award was bestowed on Joseph Ellis for his biography of Jefferson, American Sphinx:  The Character of Thomas Jefferson, in which as The New Yorker article points out, Ellis rules out the possibility that Jefferson had an affair with Hemings. It took DNA research published a year later to make deniers of a Hemings/Jefferson sexual relationship finally let go of this view (although many continued to insist that Jefferson never fathered a child with Hemings).

  As the New Yorker article suggests, it shouldn’t have taken DNA evidence to prove the relationship between Jefferson and Hemings.  DNA evidence is a fairly recent scientific advancement  — at least in the hands of historians.  For hundreds of years historians have used documentary evidence, historical context, oral history and good old fashioned logic and good sense to piece together what we call “history.”   Gordon-Reed’s triumph in winning the National Book Award vindicates the tremendous energy, and intellectual power she’s put into her work on the Hemingses and Jefferson.  But it also vindicates the tools of good old fashioned historical research and work in the hands of a skilled legal historian who is unafraid to confront and explore the harsh realities of racism and slavery in the lives of the men who (and women) created this nation.

       In any case, congratulations to Professor Gordon-Reed.

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Full post as published by BlackProf on November 21, 2008 (boomark / email).