Doing essays for magazines, writing novels, maybe a screenplay, sitting in a Paris café … That kind of thing. And when I thought of what kind of writing I would do, it was this kind. From the time I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. But I always wanted to do this type of writing. It was a bit difficult to write about myself at first. Bob Weil (my editor), Faith Childs (my agent), and I all thought a memoir/history would be a nice departure for me. Doing a short, intense project seemed to fit the moment. I was in Manhattan, and it was just around the height of the pandemic. The topic had been particularly on my mind. And in the previous year, I had done a big review - five books - for the New York Review of Books about Texas. I had just written an essay on Juneteenth for The New Yorker, talking about the origins of the holiday and the way we celebrated it during my childhood. GORDON-REED: Well, I had other book projects to deliver, and I couldn’t put them aside for another big book. How did you land on this much smaller, more intimate blend of history and memoir involving Texas? And as a historian who has typically written about subjects far removed, was focusing on your own life a difficult shift? GAZETTE: You’ve said your editor had long wanted you to write a big book about Texas. It was originally celebrated as Emancipation Day by former enslaved people and their descendants. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that slavery was over in the state. GORDON-REED: Juneteenth refers to Jwhen U.S. GAZETTE: Can you remind us what Juneteenth is and why it’s so important? The Gazette recently spoke with Gordon-Reed about her latest work. Her 2008 follow-up, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” chronicled the lives of Hemings and her children, earned her a Pulitzer Prize in history and a National Book Award.

Loeb University Professor, is famed for her groundbreaking “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (1997), in which she showed that the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, had fathered the children of Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved. A blend of history and memoir, it shines a light on some of her early experiences in the segregationist South - she became the first Black student to attend a white school in her town - and how the country’s largest state “has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.” finally reached African Americans in Galveston, Texas, on Jabout 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Gordon-Reed’s new, 144-page book is named for the holiday commemorating the moment when news of legalized slavery’s end in the U.S. While the story of her home state is a large part of the focus of historian Annette Gordon-Reed’s latest work, “ On Juneteenth,” it is also a very personal project.

Annette gordon reed on juneteenth