Pulitzer Prize winners were announced yesterday and Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of law at New York Law School and a history professor at Rutgers University won the Pulitzer for history with her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family.
In the book, Gordon-Reed explored the life of Monticello slave Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson, their children and her direct siblings.
“As The Hemingses of Monticello makes vividly clear, Monticello can no longer be known only as the home of a remarkable American leader, the author of the Declaration of Independence; nor can the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president have been expunged from history until very recently, be left out of the telling of America’s story,” reads the book jacket.
The book also won the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction.