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When Annette Gordon-Reed was 14, she saw a historian named Fawn Brodie on the Today Show talking about a new biography of Thomas Jefferson. She wanted that book. So she did what any determined teenager in the 1970s would do: she signed up for the Book of the Month Club, four books for a dollar.
She did not realize the dollar came with a catch. Books kept arriving. Bills kept arriving. Eventually her parents had to write to the club and explain that their daughter was a minor and could not legally enter into a contract.
But she kept her copy. And in the back of it, she found something that would shape the rest of her life: the recollections of Madison Hemings, who said plainly that he was the son of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings.
For more than a century, historians dismissed that testimony. Gordon-Reed didn’t. In 1997, she published a book arguing that the evidence for the relationship had been there all along, if anyone had been willing to treat the words of enslaved people as evidence. One year later, DNA results landed on front pages around the world and proved her right. She found out from a reporter who called while she was cooking dinner, fishing for a reaction to results she claimed weren’t back yet.
Our episode from 2022 told the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson. But our conversation with Gordon-Reed, now a Pulitzer Prize winner and Harvard professor, went far beyond what we could fit in 30 minutes. So we’re releasing the full interview, exclusively for HTW+ subscribers on the Time Traveler tier.
If you’re not yet a member: HTW+ is how we get to go deeper. Time Traveler members get our full-length expert interviews — the complete, unhurried conversations with the historians, authors, and eyewitnesses who make this show possible — plus every episode ad-free.
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As always — thanks for listening, and for making conversations like this one possible.
— The HTW team
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