book review on juneteenth

Advertisement

Supported by

Annette Gordon-Reed’s Surprising Recollections of Texas

• Share full article

• Apple Books
• Barnes and Noble
• Books-A-Million

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By H.W. Brands

• Published May 7, 2021 Updated Nov. 30, 2021

[ This is one of the Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2021. See the full list . ]

ON JUNETEENTH By Annette Gordon-Reed

Almost every memoir could fairly be subtitled “The Education of. …” Some explicitly embrace the formulation; “The Education of Henry Adams” is the second most influential memoir in American letters, after Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. “On Juneteenth,” Annette Gordon-Reed’s insightful, often touching reflection on the Black experience in Texas, starting with her own, lands between these two: less arch than Adams, more historical than Franklin.

Gordon-Reed’s historical emphasis, like Adams’s, is partly a professional matter. Adams was a distinguished historian at the beginning of the 20th century. Gordon-Reed has earned acclaim as one of the most important American historians of our time. Her 2008 “The Hemingses of Monticello” won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

Gordon-Reed’s education included an awakening to the complexity of human existence. Many people look to history for lessons applicable to the present; they seek a “usable past,” in the words of Van Wyck Brooks . The simpler the lessons — that is, the more reducible to adage or slogan — the more usable they are. But simplicity comes at a cost to historical accuracy. Historians recognize this; for them the appeal is in the complexity.

Time and again in this slim volume, Gordon-Reed notes her discovery that the past is more complicated than she had imagined. For her, as for millions of Texas schoolchildren before and after, the required seventh-grade Texas history class served as an introduction to what it meant to be Texan. Other states teach their own histories, but not many take it as seriously as Texas does. It’s probably no accident that Texas history is taught to students at the same age that Catholic children are confirmed and Jewish kids bar- and bat-mitzvahed.

Gordon-Reed is a proud Texan. “My Texas roots go deep — on my mother’s side back to the 1820s, on my father’s side at least to the 1860s,” she writes. She grew up celebrating Juneteenth — named for June 19, 1865, the day on which emancipation was officially announced to Texans by a Union general in Galveston — with her family and friends in Conroe , north of Houston. She thought of Juneteenth as peculiar to Texas. She admits annoyance when she first heard that Black people in other states were laying claim to the holiday: “My twinge of possessiveness grew out of the habit of seeing my home state, and the people who reside there, as special. The things that happened there couldn’t have happened in other places.” She got over her possessiveness in a typically Texan way. “It’s really a very Texas move to say that something that happened in our state was of enough consequence to the entire nation that it should be celebrated nationwide.”

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

History of Chichén Itzá written in DNA

Examining the duality of Israel

One way to help big groups of students? Volunteer tutors.

Annette gordon-reed on texas history and growing up there in the ’60s and ’70s.

Her new book, ‘On Juneteenth,’ explores the complexities of the past and how we think of them

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Courtesy of Liveright/W.W. Norton

While the story of her home state is a large part of the focus of historian Annette Gordon-Reed ’s latest work, “ On Juneteenth ,” it is also a very personal project.

Gordon-Reed’s new, 144-page book is named for the holiday commemorating the moment when news of legalized slavery’s end in the U.S. finally reached African Americans in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865 — about 2½ years after the Emancipation Proclamation. A blend of history and memoir, it shines a light on some of her early experiences in the segregationist South — she became the first Black student to attend a white school in her town — and how the country’s largest state “has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.”

Gordon-Reed, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor, is famed for her groundbreaking “Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy” (1997), in which she showed that the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, had fathered the children of Sally Hemings, a woman he enslaved. Her 2008 follow-up, “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” chronicled the lives of Hemings and her children, earned her a Pulitzer Prize in history and a National Book Award.

The Gazette recently spoke with Gordon-Reed about her latest work.

Annette Gordon-Reed

GAZETTE: Can you remind us what Juneteenth is and why it’s so important?

GORDON-REED: Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865 when U.S. Army Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that slavery was over in the state. It was originally celebrated as Emancipation Day by former enslaved people and their descendants. Now it is a state holiday in Texas.

GAZETTE: You’ve said your editor had long wanted you to write a big book about Texas. How did you land on this much smaller, more intimate blend of history and memoir involving Texas? And as a historian who has typically written about subjects far removed, was focusing on your own life a difficult shift?

GORDON-REED: Well, I had other book projects to deliver, and I couldn’t put them aside for another big book. I had just written an essay on Juneteenth for The New Yorker , talking about the origins of the holiday and the way we celebrated it during my childhood. And in the previous year, I had done a big review — five books — for the New York Review of Books about Texas. The topic had been particularly on my mind. I was in Manhattan, and it was just around the height of the pandemic. Doing a short, intense project seemed to fit the moment. Bob Weil (my editor), Faith Childs (my agent), and I all thought a memoir/history would be a nice departure for me.

It was a bit difficult to write about myself at first. But I always wanted to do this type of writing. From the time I was a kid, I wanted to be a writer. And when I thought of what kind of writing I would do, it was this kind. Essays and novels. Of course, I had James Baldwin in mind. Doing essays for magazines, writing novels, maybe a screenplay, sitting in a Paris café … That kind of thing.

GAZETTE: In the book you write that the history of Juneteenth “shows that Texas, more than any other state in the Union, has always embodied nearly every major aspect of the story of the United States of America.” Can you tell us more?

GORDON-REED: All the major currents of our history are found there: westward expansion and the clash with Indigenous people; plantation slavery; the interplay between Anglo and Hispanic culture; the fight to be a self-standing republic; Jim Crow; and hyper-religiosity.

GAZETTE: In a recent interview you said you were thinking about your mother and father as you began work on the book in 2020, and that you wanted to “put them in history.” What did you mean?

GORDON-REED: This goes back to the pandemic, I believe. Just thinking about how they would have experienced this unprecedented time, and from there thinking about the times they lived in in Texas. Deciding to have me be the one who integrated schools in our town was a momentous thing for our area — a small-scale historic act. And I wanted to write about that. I was going through some old boxes, and I found an essay I’d written about my town and these events. I don’t remember when I wrote it, but it was definitely years ago. It was a precursor to the Chapter “A Texas Town,” remarkably similar, though I had forgotten I had written this.

GAZETTE: Can you tell us a little bit about Estebanico, who traveled through Texas alongside a Spanish conquistador in the 1500s, and your decision to include him in your narrative?

GORDON-REED: Estebanico has been described as a “Black Arab” who was sold into slavery and was brought to the Americas with Spanish Explorers. He is the first recorded person of African descent in the area that would become Texas. Through a series of misadventures, the expedition that numbered in the low hundreds dwindled to a handful of people. The most famous person in the expedition that would be known to people was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Estebanico, Cabeza de Vaca, and two other men spent years enslaved by Indigenous people. After their escape, they walked across what is now Texas into Mexico, ending up on the Pacific seaboard. Estebanico served as a translator between the Europeans and Indigenous people. He apparently had a talent for languages.

GAZETTE: In “On Juneteenth” you examine Texas’ struggles and your own experiences with racial injustice and inequality. Where do you think Texas stands on these problems today?

GORDON-REED: It’s a mixed bag. There are people in Texas — people of all races and types — who want to move into a better future that takes the state beyond living in the past. The funny thing is, part of the mythology of Texas is of being a place looking to the future without fear. I’m seeing a lot of what I think can be described as fear of the future — of a certain kind of future — one in which whites don’t dominate everything. There seems to be a fear that if people of color have any power, whites will inevitably be harmed; that people of color will naturally want to hurt whites — a zero-sum game. There’s no evidence for that.

More like this

‘You can’t let your emotions overtake you so much that you can’t do the work’

Annette Gordon-Reed named University Professor

Juneteenth in a time of reckoning

The people who harbor those fears are, to be Freudian about it (specifically, Anna Freud), projecting. “Here’s what we would do if we were in their position and they had done to us what we have done to them.” But the evidence indicates — and Juneteenth shows this — that Black Texans have wanted to live in peace and with equal opportunities to live with dignity as Americans and Texans.

Unfortunately, that desire has too often been thwarted by those who feel that if whites are not dominating every single thing, they are being oppressed. That’s a feeling that comes from within. It’s not based on outside evidence. I don’t know what can be done about that, but it is work that has to be done within the white community. It’s common for people to say that Black people have to interrogate some aspects of our culture if we want to solve problems and move ahead. I think the same can be said of whites on this score.

GAZETTE: You also write that it was in Texas where you learned to think “that people could, and should, try, in whatever way they can, to make life better for others alive today and for those to come.” How did that thinking inspire your future work?

GORDON-REED: Well, it made me want to be a practicing lawyer, as a practical way to contribute to society. It didn’t work out that way for me. That was not my calling. So, I pivoted back to what I feel most comfortable doing, researching and writing. If I am to make any contribution, it will come from that.

The Harvard Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging is commemorating Juneteenth at Harvard with “A celebration of Black freedom, food, and family traditions,” which includes a talk by Annette Gordon-Reed at 4 p.m., June 14. For more information, visit the website.

Interview was lightly edited for clarity and length.

Share this article

You might like.

Research using new method upends narrative on ritual sacrifices, yields discovery on resistance built to colonial-era epidemics

Expert in law, ethics traces history, increasing polarization, steps to bolster democratic process

Research finds low-cost, online program yields significant results

More than a planetary fender-bender

New study finds Earth collided with dense interstellar cloud, possibly affecting life on planet

Alzheimer’s disease indicators track with biological changes in brain, study finds

Researchers see self-reported memory loss may be early, preclinical warning

Testing fitness of aging brain

Most voters back cognitive exams for older politicians. What do they measure?

• Got a Scoop?
• Arts & Entertainment
• Food & Drink
• Real Estate
• Indy Parenting
• Cover Stories
• Classifieds
• Create Event

Book Review | ‘On Juneteenth’ by Annette Gordon-Reed

A Pulitzer Prize–Winning Historian and Texas Native Takes a Stab at the Story of Juneteenth’s Integral Importance to American History

Share this:

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on X (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)

While Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth is, in part, about the new national holiday inspired by the events of June 19, 1865, in Galveston, Texas, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in that state — more than two months after the official end of the Civil War — the true subject of the book is the treatment of African-descended people by white Texans, and it is not a happy chronicle.

“History,” Gordon-Reed writes in the opening chapter, “is, to say the least, complicated,” but in this short book, which is as much memoir as it is historical analysis, the record of interactions between white and Black Texans doesn’t, in fact, seem especially complicated. Mostly, it’s just one long testament to how badly the former group has treated the latter.

One of Gordon-Reed’s central projects is upending the myth of “heroic” white Texas males like Jim Bowie, Sam Houston, Davy Crockett, and Stephen F. Austin. Austin, for instance, “told everyone who would listen that, without slavery, the Anglo colonies would never fully succeed and Americans who came to Texas would surely be poor for the rest of their lives.” Her chapter entitled “Remember the Alamo” is a particularly poignant reminder that the men who fought for Texas independence — “Who could not want Texas to be independent?” — were doing so for less than noble reasons. In its brief life as an independent country (1836–1846), the Republic of Texas enshrined “the right to enslave,” and Texas entered the United States as an unequivocal “slave state.”

On Juneteenth describes beatings, shooting, lynchings — rank injustice of every sort — in the years after Texas joined the Union. While Gordon-Reed herself managed to avoid the worst of this — indeed, she acknowledges that her white teachers did care about her when she was growing up — she also recognizes that although she and her teachers “shared a common culture as Texans … that culture had been subdivided by race.”

Gordon-Reed is an important public figure, so in some ways it makes sense that she would temper her remarks; nevertheless, the facts she presents rattle against the cage of her measured commentary. In Chapter Two, for instance, she describes the 1973 murder of 18-year-old Gregory Steele by police in the local jail. No one, of course, was punished, but Gordon-Reed’s comment on the crime, which took place two days before Christmas, is simply, “Our hearts were too heavy for unbridled celebration.”

In the book’s Coda, she seems to anticipate responses like mine: “When asked, as I have been very often, to explain what I love about Texas, given all that I know of what has happened there — and is still happening there — the best response I can give is that this is where my first family and connections were.” Be that as it may, when Gordon-Reed ends her book by declaring that she hopes she has “achieved the proper equilibrium,” all I can say as a reader is that, based on the evidence she has presented, the Lone Star State has much to atone for.

This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books .

More Like This

Book Review | ‘Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia’ by Christina Thompson

Poetry Connection | Creating Community through Poetry

Talking Totally Tubular with the Thompson Twins’ Tom Bailey

Please note this login is to submit events or press releases. Use this page here to login for your Independent subscription

Username or Email Address

Remember Me

Not a member? Sign up here.

You must be logged in to post a comment.

clock This article was published more than  3 years ago

Annette Gordon-Reed’s ‘On Juneteenth’ complicates notions of Black history

Daina Ramey Berry is the Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor and chair of the history department at the University of Texas at Austin. Her books include “ The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, From Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation .”

Annette Gordon-Reed grew up in the East Texas town of Conroe, about 50 miles north of Houston. The first Black student to be integrated into the public schools, she was also immersed in the area’s vibrant Black community of educators and civic leaders. Still, segregation persisted. Through the lens of childhood, she recalls separate waiting rooms in clinics, designated seating in the balcony of theaters and disparate treatment at the local drugstore. She remembers the death threats directed at her family and the occasional racist outburst from a classmate.

Yet those experiences did not tamp down the joy of her upbringing or the pride she took in being a Black woman in a state mythologized as the Wild West home of ranchers, cowboys and oilmen. In the popular imagination, she writes, “Texas is a White man.” Nothing punctures that myth so perfectly as Juneteenth, a once-obscure holiday birthed in Texas that has in recent years become a nationwide celebration of Black American independence.

In “ On Juneteenth ,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian interweaves her personal, trailblazing history with that of her home state to pierce many of the false narratives we learned as children about the country’s treatment of African Americans. To understand what happened on June 19, 1865, when African Americans in Texas first learned of their freedom — more than two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation — one needs to understand the Lone Star State, and Gordon-Reed offers a timely history lesson. She does so with beautiful prose, breathtaking stories and painful memories. Like the story of Juneteenth itself, the history she tells is one of yarns woven, dark truths glossed over and freedom delayed.

Gordon-Reed is no stranger to debunking heroic myths of the past. Most of her written work has been on the Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson in particular. In the 1990s, Gordon-Reed was at the forefront of scholars who helped convince Americans that Jefferson fathered children with an enslaved woman, Sally Hemings. Gordon-Reed’s literary gift is the ability to research and write about subjects with broadly accepted stories in a convincing way that allows readers to consider other perspectives.

In her new memoir, Gordon-Reed notes her somewhat miffed reaction in recent years to learning that Juneteenth was increasingly being celebrated outside Texas. The “red soda water,” barbecue, parades and fireworks that marked her own family’s celebration were taking on new significance as a fresh generation of activists demanded accountability for police killings of Black people and racial injustice. But her annoyance quickly gave way to a realization that Texas’s history is America’s history — and that the joy of Juneteenth, naturally, belongs to the entire country.

That is not to say the history of her part of Texas is entirely joyful. Some of the most powerful sections of this book relate to the author’s experience of growing up during the final years of segregation and her understanding of major events that occurred in her community before she was born, including the 1885 lynching of Bennett Jackson, the 1922 lynching of Joe Winters and the killing of Bob White in 1941 — acts of “pure terrorism” directed at Black men accused of sexually assaulting White women.

As a scholar of slavery, I welcome Gordon-Reed’s discussion of “origin stories” and the importance of enslaved people throughout Texas history. She criticizes the notion, unfortunately creeping into the educational system, that slavery destroyed African and African American personhood. In the classroom and in lectures, I describe these enslaved individuals’ “soul values”: the self-worth, pride and humanity they claimed in the face of commodification and oppression.

By starting her history in the 1500s with a North African named Estebanico, who traveled with the explorer Àlvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in Texas, Gordon-Reed forces us to reconsider Black history. He survived under grueling conditions and was in no way connected to the plantation slavery that entrapped so many people of African descent 300 years later. His presence in history complicates generalized understandings about Africans in North America and expands our understanding of the land that later became the United States.

Origin stories also matter, Gordon-Reed reminds us, for the Indigenous people who populated the American landscape before Europeans arrived; they matter to those who came seeking religious freedom; and they matter for those who declared independence and settled on land that was not originally theirs. Telling the stories of our nation through conflict, annihilation, negotiation, slavery, war and freedom is to tell history through the people who shaped it. “The American story is,” she rightly claims, “endlessly complicated.”

The story is further complicated by our gauzy and imprecise view in the rear-view mirror. And at times, Gordon-Reed’s meanderings into her decaying memories seem to get us lost — for instance, when she recalls a Six Flags amusement park employee in stereotypical Indian garb (complete with a feather and headband) diving into the water of a ride to rescue a child who had fallen in. Was he White? She thinks so, but she can’t be sure.

But she uses her subjective recollections as a stand-in for our nation’s self-serving amnesia about its history. In the case of the “Indian Brave,” as she remembers the Six Flags worker, the anecdote is a launching point for a rumination on the false idea that Indigenous American culture belongs to the past and that what is widely known about these original inhabitants is almost exclusively related to their relationship with White settlers.

As an expert on Jefferson, one of the architects of our founding documents, Gordon-Reed knows that liberty, equality and freedom sit at the beginning of our national story. But that national history is replete with myths. Gordon-Reed offers a gentle correction to the romanticizing of Western history and the erasure of marginalized communities. And for those cringing at the thought of revisions to American history at a moment when history has become so politicized, she shares that “history is always being revised, as new information comes to light and when different people see known documents and have their own responses to them, shaped by their individual experiences.” America has room for people who are “deeply invested” in “heroic” notions of the past, but it also should leave space for different interpretations based on new revelations and documentation. As a historian, I could not agree more.

On Juneteenth

By Annette Gordon-Reed

144 pp. $15.95

• ADMIN AREA MY BOOKSHELF MY DASHBOARD MY PROFILE SIGN OUT SIGN IN

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

IndieBound Bestseller

ON JUNETEENTH

by Annette Gordon-Reed ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2021

A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.

The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.

Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.

Pub Date: May 4, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Liveright/Norton

Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021

HISTORY | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | AFRICAN AMERICAN | UNITED STATES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

Share your opinion of this book

More by Annette Gordon-Reed

BOOK REVIEW

by Annette Gordon-Reed & Peter S. Onuf

by Annette Gordon-Reed

More About This Book

SEEN & HEARD

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.

Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-670-88146-5

Page Count: 430

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

More by Robert Greene

by Robert Greene

BOOK TO SCREEN

GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

by Jack Weatherford ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2004

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford ( The History of Money , 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols , which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | WORLD | HISTORY

More by Jack Weatherford

by Jack Weatherford

• Discover Books Fiction Thriller & Suspense Mystery & Detective Romance Science Fiction & Fantasy Nonfiction Biography & Memoir Teens & Young Adult Children's
• News & Features Bestsellers Book Lists Profiles Perspectives Awards Seen & Heard Book to Screen Kirkus TV videos In the News
• Kirkus Prize Winners & Finalists About the Kirkus Prize Kirkus Prize Judges
• Magazine Current Issue All Issues Manage My Subscription Subscribe
• Writers’ Center Hire a Professional Book Editor Get Your Book Reviewed Advertise Your Book Launch a Pro Connect Author Page Learn About The Book Industry
• More Kirkus Diversity Collections Kirkus Pro Connect My Account/Login
• About Kirkus History Our Team Contest FAQ Press Center Info For Publishers
• Privacy Policy
• Terms & Conditions
• Reprints, Permission & Excerpting Policy

© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Popular in this Genre

Hey there, book lover.

We’re glad you found a book that interests you!

Please select an existing bookshelf

Create a new bookshelf.

We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!

Please sign up to continue.

It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!

Already have an account? Log in.

Trouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.

Almost there!

• Industry Professional

Welcome Back!

Sign in using your Kirkus account

Contact us: 1-800-316-9361 or email [email protected].

Don’t fret. We’ll find you.

Magazine Subscribers ( How to Find Your Reader Number )

If You’ve Purchased Author Services

Don’t have an account yet? Sign Up.

Book Review: On Juneteenth

by Jon Tracey

Posted on June 19, 2021

Reviewed by Jon Tracey

Thanks to current discussions of inequality and increased reflection on the past, Juneteenth has grown from a Texas tradition to one that has garnered attention across the nation. This week, it has even become a federal holiday. Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth presents the event’s uniquely Texas origins, since June 19 th , 1865 marked Major General Gordon Granger’s announcement of emancipation in Texas, while also hinting at national significance. Best known for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family , for which she received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in History, Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and an accomplished writer. This book, however, is a departure from traditional history books; it is part memoir, part Texas history, and part reflection on heroic myths.

On Juneteenth is split into six chapters, each separate yet still connected by these overall themes of race, memoir, and memory. “This, Then, Is Texas” serves as an overview of the complex history of one of the nation’s largest states and historically home to indigenous, Hispanic, black, and white communities. This is key, since much of the work is a history and reflection on Texas, and useful for readers (like myself) without close ties to the state. It is followed by “A Texas Town,” which is a memoir on her hometown, Conroe, and the racial divides she experienced. “Origin Stories: Africans in Texas” presents what you’d expect from a chapter of that title, while exploring how nation-oriented histories left out the stories of many groups that called that area home. “People of the Past and Present” begins with a return to memoir then picks up that thread of Texas’s many different communities.

The final two chapters were the ones that resonated most with me. “Remember the Alamo” is a masterful work on memory, looking at American and Texan myths of gallant foundings that brushed aside many individuals, groups, and stories. Her look at mythmaking, the cowboy, and the West works clearly with Heather Cox Richardson’s argument on myths in her 2020 How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America . “On Juneteenth” then returns to Granger’s General Order No. 3, which stated, in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.” Gordon-Reed quotes from the Declaration of Independence, Texan founding documents, and Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech” to show just how meaningful a change this was for Texas before providing an overview of the Reconstruction Era in the state.

On Juneteenth is a short book, coming it at just above 140 small 4.25” by 7.25” pages. It isn’t a traditional academic book; you won’t find lengthy descriptions and footnotes. In addition to the easily digestible size, her writing style flows clearly; it’s easy to fly through most of the work on a warm afternoon in a folding lawn chair. The decision to omit footnotes and write for a general audience doesn’t mean Gordon-Reed skipped research, however. Though much of the work draws from her personal experiences, it also boasts a respectable list of works consulted that doubles as a list of follow-up reading. It fits well within this selected literature too, contextualizing what exactly Juneteenth can mean.

Gordon-Reed writes that “echoes of the past remain, leaving their traces in the people and events of the present and future.” On Juneteenth is a highly readable and accessible way to begin to reflect on complicated and layered pasts in the United States. Throughout the book, she grapples with the long history of Texas as well as the questions of what makes it special and how she could love a place with so many “difficulties” in its history. Gordon-Reed concludes that “Love does not require taking an uncritical stance towards the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places – and people, ourselves included – without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.” Perhaps we could all think that way when we write histories about that which we love.

Share this:

1 response to book review: on juneteenth.

What a timely review. How enjoyable to read on our first national Juneteenth celebration. Annette Gordon-Reed is a fabulous historian. Gordon Granger was a Union hero at Chickamauga bringing his reserve corps to the assistance of George Thomas without orders from Rosecrans who had fled the battle. Well covered, like all the war, in Shelby Foote’s classic narrative.

Please leave a comment and join the discussion! Cancel reply

ECW Podcast

Publications.

Contributors

• Member Login
• Library Patron Login

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR

FREE NEWSLETTERS

Search: Title Author Article Search String:

On Juneteenth : Book summary and reviews of On Juneteenth by Annette Gordon-Reed

Summary | Reviews | More Information | More Books

On Juneteenth

by Annette Gordon-Reed

Critics' Opinion:

Readers' rating:

Published May 2021 144 pages Genre: Essays Publication Information

Rate this book

About this book

Book summary.

The essential, sweeping story of Juneteenth's integral importance to American history, as told by a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Texas native.

Weaving together American history, 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. Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story. Reworking the traditional "Alamo" framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself. In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing. 2 black-and-white illustrations

• "Beyond the Book" articles
• Free books to read and review (US only)
• Find books by time period, setting & theme
• Read-alike suggestions by book and author
• Book club discussions
• and much more!
• Just $45 for 12 months or $15 for 3 months.
• More about membership!

Media Reviews

Reader reviews.

"Pulitzer-winner Gordon-Reed interweaves history, politics, and memoir in these immersive and well-informed essays reflecting on the history of Juneteenth...Despite the thorny racial history, Gordon-Reed expresses a deep fondness for her native state, writing that 'love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one's affections.' This brisk history lesson entertains and enlightens." - Publishers Weekly "The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what [Juneteenth] means to her and to the rest of the nation...A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths." - Kirkus Reviews

Click here and be the first to review this book!

Author Information

• Books by this Author

Annette Gordon-Reed Author Biography

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard. Gordon-Reed has won sixteen book prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 and the National Book Award in 2008, for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2008). In addition to articles and reviews, her other works include Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (UVA Press, 1997); Vernon Can Read! A Memoir , a collaboration with Vernon Jordan (PublicAffairs 2001); Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History (Oxford University Press, 2002); a volume of essays that she edited, Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010) and, with Peter S. Onuf, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, ...

... Full Biography

Other books by Annette Gordon-Reed at BookBrowse

More Recommendations

Readers also browsed . . ..

• State by State by Sean Wilsey, Matt Weiland
• The Inevitable by David Shields, Bradford Morrow
• Portable Magic by Emma Smith
• How Far the Light Reaches by Sabrina Imbler
• A Map of Future Ruins by Lauren Markham
• An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky
• Transient and Strange by Nell Greenfieldboyce
• I See You Made an Effort by Annabelle Gurwitch
• Serious Face by Jon Mooallem
• I Just Keep Talking by Nell Irvin Painter

more essays...

Support BookBrowse

Join our inner reading circle, go ad-free and get way more!

Find out more

BookBrowse Book Club

Win This Book

Bright and Tender Dark by Joanna Pearson

A beautifully written, wire-taut debut novel about a murder on a college campus and its aftermath twenty years later.

Solve this clue:

and be entered to win..

Your guide to exceptional           books

BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.

Subscribe to receive some of our best reviews, "beyond the book" articles, book club info and giveaways by email.

Free Weekly Newsletters

Keep up with what's happening in the world of books: reviews, previews, interviews and more.

Spam Free : Your email is never shared with anyone; opt out any time.