On April 21, 2022, the History Department at Washington University in St. Louis will host the inaugural David T. Konig Lecture. Professor Annette Gordon-Reed (Harvard University) will deliver a lecture titled "The Jefferson Image in the American Mind in the 21st Century. The changing meaning of Jefferson's legacy in Modern America":
Annette Gordon-Reed will take Thomas Jefferson as a point of departure for a thought-provoking consideration of how Americans understand their own history. She will consider how terms like freedom and slavery—terms now inseparable from Jefferson—have shaped the ways people talk about Jefferson. This will be a wide-ranging consideration that explores politics and race, nation and identity, memory and memorials.
Gordon-Reed is Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University, where she is on the faculty of both the Harvard Law School and the Department of History. She is the author of numerous books in both law and history. She has received over sixteen major book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for The Hemingses of Monticello, a magisterial study that explores one enslaved family on Thomas Jefferson’s plantation and in the process reimagines how we understand both Jefferson’s landmark home and the experience of slavery. Her most recent book is the New York Times best-seller On Juneteenth, which combines both American history and family history in telling the story of commemoration of emancipation.
More information is available here.
-- Karen Tani
