Jefferson, Race & Democracy - Insights by Gordon-Reed & Onuf

Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf discuss "Jefferson, Race, and Democracy" at an American Academy event held in Cambridge on February 6, 2018. Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf are coauthors of "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016).


Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, Professor of History at Harvard University, and formerly the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. From 2014 to 2015, she was the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen's College, University of Oxford. A renowned law professor and scholar of American history, Gordon-Reed has previously taught at the New York Law School and at Rutgers-Newark. She has published six books, among them The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008), which won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in history and the National Book Award for nonfiction. She is the recipient of many honors, including the National Humanities Medal (2009), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library (2010-2011), a MacArthur Fellowship (2010), and the National Organization for Women in New York City's Woman of Power and Influence Award (1999). As one of the foremost scholars of Thomas Jefferson, her work is notable for having changed our understanding of Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings. She received the A.B. degree (1981) in history from Dartmouth College and the J.D. (1984) from Harvard Law School, where she was a member of the Law Review. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and has served as a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.


Peter S. Onuf is Senior Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello and Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Virginia. In 1993, he conceived and organized a conference on Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia. That conference and the book that grew out of it, Jeffersonian Legacies (1993), transformed Jeffersonian scholarship. The text marked the line between older scholarship that focused on Jefferson’s life and new scholarship that grappled more fully with Jefferson’s influence on federalism, slavery, race, and westward expansion, among other things. This shift in focus reinvigorated Jeffersonian scholarship, attracting a younger generation to study Jefferson’s life as a window into different recurring themes in American history. His publications include His publications include The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2007), The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race and the New Republic (2002), and Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (2001). With his brother, political theorist Nicholas G. Onuf, he collaborated on Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (2006), a history of international law and order in the Atlantic states' system during the Age of Revolutions and early nineteenth century. He is also a founding co-host of the public radio show and podcast BackStory. He held the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professorship at Queen’s College, University of Oxford in 2008, and this year is the Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014.