PROGRAM

Please join us as we welcome the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed to discuss her new book, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs,” Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. This groundbreaking work of history  explicates Thomas Jefferson’s vision of himself, the American Revolution, his home, religion, slavery, and race.

Gordon-Reed, the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School, whose The Hemingses of Monticello won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, will be in conversation with Harold Holzer, the Jonathan F. Fanton Director of Roosevelt House, to discuss the ways in which her book presents an absorbing and revealing character study that dispels the many clichés that have accrued over the years about our third president. Professor Gordon-Reed’s new book, co-written with Peter Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, challenges the widely prevalent belief that Jefferson remains so opaque as to be unknowable, and offers a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, tracing his philosophical development from youth to old age, and based on a close reading of Jefferson’s own words.