By Annette Gordon-Reed.  ISBN 978-0-393-06477-3.  Copyright 2008.  Hardcover with 798 pages including notes, index, and 37 illustrations.   

Winner of the George Washington Book Prize 2009.  Winner of the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction.  Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for History. 

This epic work tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently.  Historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700’s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826.  This story brings to life not only Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson but also their children and Hemings’s siblings, who shared a father with Jefferson’s wife, Martha.  The family’s saga is set against the backdrop of Revolutionary America, Paris on the eve of its own revolution, 1790’s Philadelphia, and plantation life at Monticello.