Annual dinner keynote speaker Annette Gordon-Reed (and her top five most influential books)

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Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, and a Professor of History at Harvard University. She received the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2008). She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1997), Vernon Can Read!: A Memoir, with Vernon Jordan, Jr. (2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (editor, 2002), and Andrew Johnson (2010).

Her most recently-published book is "The Most Blessed of Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination (with Peter S. Onuf). Her honors include the National Humanities Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Organization for Women in New York City’s Woman of Power and Influence Award. Gordon-Reed was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.

“Her book is at once a painstaking history of slavery, an unflinching gaze at the ways it has defined us, and a humane exploration of lives—grand and humble—that ‘our peculiar institution’ conjoined. This is more than the story of Thomas Jefferson and his house slave Sally Hemings; it is a deeply moral and keenly intelligent probe of the harsh yet all-too-human world they inhabited and the bloodline they share.”

 – From the National Book Award citation for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

What kind of books have inspired our keynote speaker?

Here are Annette Gordon-Reed’s top five most influential books:

The Souls of Black Folk, by W. E. B. Du Bois
No Name in the Street, by James Baldwin
Notes of a Native Son, by James Baldwin
Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History, by Fawn Brodie
White Over Black, by Winthrop Jordan

Please join us at the September 22 Annual Dinner! Reserve your tickets HERE.