National Speaker Series- Catherine Kerrison

Catherine Kerrison

Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America

Book Signing & Presentation  
Sunday, January 27, 2019
4:00 – 6:00 PM at Slover Library

235 E Plume St, Norfolk, VA 23510

 

The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters—two white and free, one black and enslaved—and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America
 
Thomas Jefferson had three daughters: Martha and Maria by his wife, Martha Wayles Jefferson, and Harriet by his slave Sally Hemings. In Jefferson’s Daughters,Catherine Kerrison, a scholar of early American and women’s history, recounts the remarkable journey of these three women—and how their struggle to define themselves reflects both the possibilities and the limitations that resulted from the American Revolution.
            
For this groundbreaking triple biography, Kerrison has uncovered never-before-published documents written by the Jefferson sisters when they were in their teens, as well as letters written by members of the Jefferson and Hemings families. She has interviewed Hemings family descendants (and, with their cooperation, initiated DNA testing) and searched for descendants of Harriet Hemings. 
            
The eventful lives of Thomas Jefferson’s daughters provide a unique vantage point from which to examine the complicated patrimony of the American Revolution itself.  The richly interwoven story of these three strong women and their fight to shape their own destinies sheds new light on the ongoing movement toward human rights in America—and on the personal and political legacy of one of our most controversial Founding Fathers.

Catherine Kerrison is an associate professor of history at Villanova University, where she teaches courses in Colonial and Revolutionary America and women’s and gender history. She holds a PhD in American history from the College of William and Mary. Her first book, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South, won the Outstanding Book Award from the History of Education Society. She lives in Berwyn, Pennsylvania.

Event date: 
Sunday, January 27, 2019 - 4:00pm to 6:00pm
Event address: 
235 E Plume St
Norfolk, VA 23510-1613
Jefferson's Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America By Catherine Kerrison Cover Image
$28.00
Email or call for price.
ISBN: 9781101886243
Published: Ballantine Books - January 30th, 2018

The remarkable untold story of Thomas Jefferson’s three daughters—two white and free, one black and enslaved—and the divergent paths they forged in a newly independent America