MacArthur Fellow, legal scholar, and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed ’81 discusses the paradox of America’s historic commitment to freedom and its real history of slavery and racism with Associate Professor of History Julia Rabig.

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Annette Gordon-Reed ’81

Annette Gordon-Reed ’81 is a legal scholar and historian whose 2008 investigation of slavery in the American colonial period and the early American republic, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history. In 2010, she was awarded the MacArthur “genius” Fellowship for her scholarship on Thomas Jefferson. In July 2020, she was named the Carl M. LoebUniversity Professor at Harvard University, its highest faculty honor. A descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas in the 1850s, Gordon-Reed interweaves American history with memoir in her searing chronicle, On Juneteenth. Reed served on Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees from 2010–2018.

Julia Rabig

Julia Rabig earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania and completed post-doctoral fellowships at the Frederick Douglass Institute for African and African American Studies at the University of Rochester. She has also taught in the African American Studies Program at Boston University and in the Black Studies Department at Amherst College. "When and why do social movements coalesce to produce dramatic change? How are social movements institutionalized and what is gained and lost in that process? What happens in their aftermath? These are questions that animate my scholarship and teaching. My research encompasses African American history, urban and gender studies, and globalization."​