April 22, 2009
Why History? Posted by John F. Ross at 12:00 AM EST This is the first entry by American Heritage Executive Editor and author John F. Ross in a new blog about the trials, tribulations, and oddball passions of a history editor. Kudos to Annette Gordon-Reed on her Pulitzer Okay, I'm going to crow just a little bit. We here at AH were thrilled to publish an original essay of Annette Gordon-Reed’s before she won the National Book Award and just recently, the Pulitzer, for her utterly absorbing book on the Hemings family at Monticello. It’s called “Were Thomas Jefferson & Sally Hemings in Love?” in AH, Fall 2008. Before you start thinking, ‘here we go again sensationalizing history,’ you ought to read it. (Click here.) This, in our humble opinion, is strong history writing because it not only offers us new perspectives on things we think we know, but asks tough new questions that make us think about why we interpret the past the way we do. Thinking about romantic love in the context of the master-slave relationship, she opines, gets seriously in the way of sorting out the real nature of their relationship. (At its worst, our wanting to believe that Jefferson truly loved her may derive from an impulse to want to redeem him somehow, "perhaps not totally exonerating him, but in some small but important way moderating the disturbing facts." That he owned her and their seven children. That he didn't free them in his will. That he wrote down their names, along with the crops, seeds, and his other possessions, in his little dog-eared Farm Book. Romantic love, in other words, is not the best lens with which to examine their partnership. This is not psycho-babble, or a stab at gaining attention by tar and feathering a national icon, but rather an attempt to pose some trenchant questions that will help us look more deeply and with greater clarity into the past. In her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, Gordon-Reed, paints an engaging, informative, and important new picture of life at Monticello—and brings to light the complexities of white/black, male/female, slave/owner relationships that have remained largely hidden. For those avid fans of AH, you'll remember that we broke the story about the Jefferson/Hemings relationship in our June 1972 issue with a piece by historian Fawn Brodie, and have reported on new developments ever since, including a piece by the previous editor, Richard Snow, about the discovery that he was descended from Hemings. (Click here.) So, congratulations Professor Gordon-Reed on a job well done.
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