#198 Juneteenth w/ Annette Gordon-Reed
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2021
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Juneteenth, which celebrates the emancipation of enslaved Americans at the end of the Civil War, has gone from a local holiday in Texas to a national day of celebration for many Americans. In this episode we speak with legal scholar and Pulitzer Prize winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed about her new book On Juneteenth and the ways that the holiday, her personal story and the history of the US can help us better understand the world today.
Annette Gordon-Reed is 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. You can follow her on twitter at @Agordonreed.
A special thanks to Ken Burns for selecting this episode as one of his favorite podcast moments of 2021! Hear Ken explain why he picked this episode on Hark Audio's "31 Days of Hark".
This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is in the loop, the legion of Osiris podcasts. |
| 0:03.9 | Osiris is creating a community that connects people like you with live experiences |
| 0:08.1 | and podcasts about artists and topics you love. |
| 0:11.6 | Get in the loop at Osirispod.com. |
| 0:23.8 | I'm Bob Crawford, and this is The Road to Now. |
| 0:30.5 | Over the past five years, Ben and I have been honored to welcome some of the most important historians of our time to this show. |
| 0:34.3 | This week is no different, and I'd like to say maybe more so, as we finally welcome Annette Gordon |
| 0:44.8 | Reed to The Road to Now. |
| 0:47.2 | This is something that Ben, I have to give Ben total credit because we've been trying to get |
| 0:52.8 | her on the show for a while and Ben |
| 0:55.1 | accomplished that task last week and she was every bit as gracious, every bit as incisive and |
| 1:08.9 | intelligent and just such a warm, warm person and an incredible historian. |
| 1:18.4 | So we're so excited. |
| 1:20.5 | If you don't know who Annette Gordon-Reed is, you are in for a real treat. |
| 1:27.1 | She is the Carl M. Loeb University professor at Harvard |
| 1:31.3 | University, but she's also the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the Hemmings of Monticello. So I'm |
| 1:39.5 | sure you've heard of that book. But we're here to talk with Annette this week about her current book |
| 1:47.3 | on Juneteenth. It's called On Juneteenth, and it's really unique. It's a memoir, and it's a historical |
| 1:55.8 | account. So those are hard to write, and, you know, what's really incredible about her book is when I think about the moment we're in, |
| 2:10.6 | no, we're not going to move forward together in agreement. |
| 2:14.5 | I believe we're going to move forward together in disagreement. |
| 2:18.6 | And how do we do that? |
... |
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