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JEFFERSON IN COURT: CLASS / UNIT PROMPT

African American Annette Gordon-Reed's 1997 (pre-DNA) book Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy is an exhaustive and blistering analysis of the previous scholarship by white historians of the 19th and 20th centuries who fostered the official narrative of Jefferson's innocence of all "charges" related to Hemings. It's a monumental investigation of how history is constructed, a recognized classic. So, who are we to believe? Is AGR the model objective historian? Or does she too have an agenda that warps her vision? We have to give her as close a look as we did the other historians.