Congratulations are in order for AHA member Annette Gordon-Reed, professor at Rutgers University-Newark and New York Law School, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. The book recounts the history of four generations of the Hemings family up to the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson. The Pulitzer judges said The Hemingses of Monticello is a “painstaking exploration of a sprawling multi-generation slave family that casts provocative new light on the relationship between Sally Hemings and her master, Thomas Jefferson.”

The book previously won the 2008 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Prof. Gordon-Reed was also recently named a Guggenheim Fellow for 2009.

The other finalists for the Pulitzer were This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by member Drew Gilpin Faust (winner of the New-York Historical Society’s History Book Club Prize) and The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s by G. Calvin Mackenzie and AHA member Robert Weisbrot.

This post first appeared on AHA Today.