On Juneteenth

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. The author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello, she lives in New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

"If this book is a departure for [Gordon-Reed], it’s still guided by the humane skepticism that has animated her previous work. In a series of short, moving essays, she explores ‘the long road’ to June 19, 1865, when Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in Texas, the state where Gordon-Reed was born and raised… No matter what she’s looking at, Gordon-Reed pries open this space between the abstract and particular… Gordon-Reed acknowledges that origin stories matter, even if they often have more to say about “our current needs and desires” than with the facts of history, which are often stranger and less assimilable than any self-serving mythology will allow… One of the things that makes this slender book stand out is Gordon-Reed’s ability to combine clarity with subtlety, elegantly carving a path between competing positions, instead of doing as too many of us do in this age of hepped-up social-media provocations by simply reacting to them. In ‘On Juneteenth’ she leads by example, revisiting her own experiences, questioning her own assumptions — and showing that historical understanding is a process, not an end point."