Award-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed is no stranger to diving into the areas that make readers uncomfortable.  In her 2021 book, On Juneteenth, Gordon-Reed offers a hybrid history and memoir that gets personal and is timely as Texas lawmakers battle over voting rights.  Gordon-Reed speaks to the current controversy through a wider lens and suggests many Americans have a hard time seeing the Lone Star state fully because of the mythology of West Texas that dominates popular culture.  Arguing that by only seeing the cowboy and oilman, we are missing a character that may be even more important to understanding the story in Texas -- the plantation owner

Annette Gordon-Reed, Law professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. She is currently the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University, where she is also the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and a professor of history in the university’s Faculty of Arts & Sciences. Author, most recently of On Juneteenth from Liveright/W. H. Norton.
 

On Juneteenth
Liveright/W. H. Norton

 

This week's closing music, New Hope, by Audiobinger,
used under a Creative Commons By Attribution 4.0 license.

Additional music by Blue Dot Session.

Loops and beats by
Dissimilation Heavy Industries