With great historical imagination, she has done far more than put together a convincing case for the Jefferson-Hemings relationship. She has set out to do what she thinks professional historians should have been doing all along. The Hemingses of Monticello makes a powerful argument for the historical significance of the Hemings family not only for its engagement with a principal architect of the early Republic, but also for the ways the family embodies the complexities and contradictions of slavery in the United States., In her new book Gordon-Reed has not abandoned her incisive legal approach to evidence, but here she has essentially become a historian, and a superb one.
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