The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family by Annette Gordon-Reed is a 798-page hardcover published in 2008 by W.W. Norton & Company, and is a stated first edition. The dust jacket is price clipped and there is very minor shelf wear along the jacket edges. Inside, the pages are clean and the binding is solid. The condition is very good.
In the mid-1700s the English captain of a trading ship that made runs between England and the Virginia colony fathered a child by an enslaved woman living near Williamsburg. The woman, whose name is unknown and who is believed to have been born in Africa, was owned by the Eppses, a prominent Virginia family. The captain, whose surname was Hemings, and the woman had a daughter. She was named Elizabeth.
So begins the Hemingses of Monticello, Annette Gordon-Reed's "riveting history" of the Hemings family, whose story comes to vivid life in this brilliantly researched and deeply moving work. Gordon-Reed, author of the highly acclaimed historiography Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, unearths startling new information about the Hemingses, Jefferson, and his white family. Although the book presents the most detailed and richly drawn portrait ever written of Sarah Hemings, better known by her nickname Sally, who bore seven children by Jefferson over the course of their thirty-eight-year liaison, The Hemingses of Monticello tells more than the story of her life with Jefferson and their children. The Hemingses as a whole take their rightful place in the narrative of the family's extraordinary engagement with one of history's most important figures.
ISBN: 978-0-393-06477-3
