Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure—a riddle—a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people—including his own family—in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever. Professor Annette Gordon-Reed will discuss the many shifting “selves” of Jefferson: father, husband, slave owner, diplomat, politician, and cosmopolitan. This character study will analyze that changing image of Thomas Jefferson—from the 1940s, when the Jefferson Memorial was first built, up until this moment when the Broadway musical Hamilton is helping to shape attitudes about him today.

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. Her new book Most Blessed of Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination (with Peter S. Onuf) was published in April 2016. Ms. Gordon-Reed received the 2008 National Book Award and the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (2009). She is also the author of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (1998) and Andrew Johnson (2011).

2016 MALKIN LECTURE SERIES

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Wednesday, November 9 at 6:30pm
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