"On Juneteenth" With Annette Gordon-Reed
Join us for an evening with Harvard Professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed. In her new book On Juneteenth, the historian and Texas native examines the Lone Star State roots of Juneteenth and its continuing importance to the fight for racial equity. Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, Chair of the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin, moderates the discussion. This program is presented by Humanities Texas, LBJ Presidential Library, and the History Department at The University of Texas at Austin. About the speakers: 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. Gordon-Reed’s honors include the National Humanities Medal, a MacArthur “Genius Grant,” and the Frederick Douglass Prize. Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and Chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a Fellow of Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History, the George W. Littlefield Professorship in American History, and the former Associate Dean of the Graduate School. She is “a scholar of the enslaved” and a specialist on gender and slavery as well as Black women’s history in the United States. Berry is the award-winning author and editor of six books and serves as a consultant for museums and historical societies throughout the United States. About the Book: Weaving together American history, a dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed—herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s—forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.
