By Loretta Fulton

The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2009 will be guest speaker for a lecture hosted by the Carl Spain Center on Race Studies and Spiritual Action in Abilene Christian University’s Chapel on the Hill.

The Don Williams and Royce Money Distinguished Lecture Series, featuring Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed, will begin at 7 p.m. May 1. Dr. Gordon-Reed’s topic will be “The Story of Our Founding and Its Impact for Us Today.”  Click here to register.

Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed

The following is from Tryce Prince, executive director of the Spain Center:

“This year marks the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. This commemoration— known as ‘America 250’— provides us with an opportunity to practice collective remembrance. We can courageously face our past— its triumphs and tragedies— knowing we have the power of God in us to help us realize our great potential.”

The following biographical information on Dr. Gordon-Reed is from the Harvard Law School website:
“Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family(W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997), Vernon Can Read! A Memoir, a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs, 2001), Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002), a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her most recent book is On Juneteenth (Liveright Publishing, 2021). Gordon-Reed was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford (Queens College) 2014-2015. Between 2010 and 2015, she was the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.  She was the 2018-2019 President of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. She is the current President of the Ames Foundation.  A selected list of her honors includes a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, the Frederick Douglass Book Prize, the George Washington Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Gordon-Reed served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College from 2010 to 2018.  She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and was a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the American Philosophical Society.”

Loretta Fulton is creator and editor of Spirit of Abilene