Annette Gordon-Reed Presents The Story of Our Founding

The first Black person to win the Pulitzer Prize for History, and the New York Times’ pick for one of the most important American historians working.

Annette Gordon-Reed comes to New Canaan Library in the country’s 250th year to talk about the Constitution and the formation of American government — a sweeping account of the founding paired with a hard look at what it means now. She was a key expert contributor to Ken Burns’s 2025 PBS series The American Revolution, which the library has been screening in full this autumn, so the talk lands squarely alongside it.

About the speaker. Gordon-Reed wrote The Hemingses of Monticello, which won the National Book Award, and the bestseller On Juneteenth. Her honours include the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Obama, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship, and she is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. She was also the first Black student to enroll at an all-white school in her Texas town; there is now a school there named after her.

Make a night of it. Part of the library’s America 250 programming, with Elm Street Books on site for sales and signing. Registration is required, and the library does not publish a price — confirm on its event page before you plan around it.