Annette Gordon-Reed. Photo courtesy The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens
In a year marked by a reckoning with the country’s fraught racial past, a virtual Huntington lecture by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian examines our relationships to problematic historical figures like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Harvard Law School professor Annette Gordon-Reed discusses The Past in the Present: America’s Founding and Us at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, in the free, inaugural lecture for The Huntington’s new Shapiro Center for American History and Culture.
The launch of the Shapiro Center for American History and Culture, underwritten by L. Dennis and Susan R. Shapiro, was announced last December, before the pandemic and protests. The couple donated a generous endowment to The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens, as well as their collection of 340 rare items primarily related to American presidential administrations from the 18th to early-20th centuries. The center is not a brick-and-mortar facility but a programming-oriented entity with initiatives such as lectures, fellowships, exhibitions and publications.
“Harvard University Professor Annette Gordon-Reed was an obvious choice to speak at the inauguration of the recently-endowed Shapiro Center for American History and Culture at The Huntington,” said Steven Hindle, The Huntington’s W.M. Keck Foundation director. “She is one of the most acclaimed historians working on the founding of the United States, having won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her groundbreaking book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family [W.W. Norton & Co.; 2009]; and nobody is better qualified to discuss the paradox of liberty that is fundamental to the history of this country.”
Gordon-Reed’s book explores the life of Jefferson’s slave Sally Hemings, who gave birth to six children with him, as well as that of Sally’s enslaved mother, Elizabeth “Betty” Hemings, and her children by her master, John Wayles. On Wayles’ death, Jefferson and his wife, Martha, who was Wayles’ daughter, inherited Sally (Martha’s half-sister), Betty and other members of the Hemings family.
Gordon-Reed’s earlier book, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy [University of Virginia Press], came out a year before the 1998 DNA study that genetically linked one of Hemings’ male descendants with the male line of the then-recognized Jefferson family.
More recently, nationwide Black Lives Matter protests have raised uncomfortable questions about Jefferson and Washington, both of whom owned slaves.
On the eve of Juneteenth 2020, a statue of Washington was toppled in Portland, Oregon. A Portland statue of Jefferson met the same fate. A student campaign at New York’s Hofstra University, “Jefferson’s Gotta Go!,” led the university to move its statue of Jefferson to a less prominent location.
Gordon-Reed disputed the wisdom of the trend.
“I don’t think statues of George Washington should be removed. I don’t think statues of Jefferson should be removed,” she said by email. “Both men were essential to the formation of the country we live in. They are integral to our story, and we have to talk about all aspects of their lives and put them in proper context.”
Like the rest of the nation, Gordon-Reed has had her life changed by the Covid-19 restrictions. She has been teaching classes via Zoom since March. While she usually commuted between Manhattan and Cambridge, Mass., she wrote, “I decided to remain in NYC during the pandemic.” On the bright side, she did get to spend more time with her husband, New York State Supreme Court Justice Robert R. Reed, since the courts have been closed for months; she’s had more time to practice piano.
Hindle said future Huntington lectures will spring from “the areas of strength in our collections: The first four in the sequence highlight our holdings in the naval history of the American civil war, maritime history, the history of slavery, and the genre of science fiction known as Afrofuturism.”
Huntington Zoom events this month also include: Waves of Calamity: Race, Water and Power in the Evolution of Slavery’s Memory at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 14; The Huntington Library story is told in One Hundred and One: Eleven Million Items and Still Counting at 3 p.m., Friday, Oct. 16, and What Is a Second Edition? A Pictorial Introduction to Bibliographical Terms at 10 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 21. All are free with reservations.
The Past in the Present: America’s Founding and Us is a free Zoom lecture at 4 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 17. Reserve your Zoom attendance here.
