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Join Humanities Texas and Rice University on June 20, 2023, for an evening with Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annette Gordon-Reed. Gordon-Reed will discuss her most recent book, On Juneteenth, which examines the Texas roots of Juneteenth and its continuing importance to the fight for racial equity. A book-signing will follow the presentation.
Tuesday, June 20, 2023
7:00 p.m. CT
Rice University
Hudspeth Auditorium, Anderson-Clarke Center
6100 Main Street
Houston, TX 77005
Parking will be available in West Lot 5.
This event is free and open to the public, but seating is limited; please register online in advance.
NOTE: Registration for the in-person event is now closed. Please use the link below to watch the lecture via livestream.
The presentation will also be livestreamed via Zoom.
Many communities around the state will be celebrating Juneteenth this weekend. To find a Juneteenth event near you, visit our Events page.
Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. She has won sixteen book awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in history in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, both for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Her most recent book is On Juneteenth, a memoir and history of Texas. A select list of her honors includes a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, and the National Humanities Medal.
Weaving together American history, a dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed's On Juneteenth provides a historian's view of the country's long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed—herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s—forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.