Pulitzer-prize winner Annette Gordon-Reed is one of the foremost scholars on Thomas Jefferson. She recently visited UC Berkeley from Harvard Law School to discuss the contradictions that define the third President of the Unites States. He had a vision for the United States of America but race and slavery complicated his views on what kind of society was possible on the American continent. He ran a plantation with slave labor yet had a decades-long relationship with the slave Sally Hemings, likely fathering her six children. Hear more about what that relationship might have been based on historical documents and Gordon-Reed’s research.
In these fascinating programs she looks at how Jefferson’s complex views on race and slavery evolved as he imagined the future of the new country and dealt with the reality of American social and political life.
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