Annette Gordon-Reed opens On Juneteenth by reflecting on her conflicted emotions about Juneteenth becoming a national celebration. It is, she notes, a distinctly Texan holiday, since it commemorates the day in June 1865 when Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston to announce the end of legalized slavery in the United States—two months after Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox. It's also a deeply personal holiday, one that Black Texans have celebrated with family and friends ever since Granger read out his proclamation. And yet, Gordon-Reed acknowledges, it's also a profoundly American holiday, just as Texas is perhaps the most profoundly American state.

This ambivalence inspires Gordon-Reed to explore the significance of this holiday within the broader context of Texan history. On Juneteenth is a collection of historical essays, ranging from the Spanish conquest to the present, that investigates what it means to be Texan. Against the background of the archetypal white cowboy and the ten-gallon hat oilman, Gordon-Reed demonstrates how the history of Texas is also the history of African Americans, Native Americans and Mexican Americans. Indeed, slavery was integral to the formation of the Republic of Texas—as well as the state of Texas. Understanding this truth, Gordon-Reed argues, is key to understanding the role racism continues to play in Texas and, by extension, the nation.

As the Carl W. Loeb Professor of history at Harvard, Gordon-Reed is no stranger to illuminating the uncomfortable truths of our past. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, a groundbreaking multigenerational history of the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an enslaved African American woman.

On Juneteenth is written on a smaller and more personal scale than her previous work, but it is no less powerful. Gordon-Reed's essays seamlessly merge history and memoir into a complex portrait of her beloved, turbulent Texas, revealing new truths about a state that, more than any other, embodies all the virtues and faults of America. 

With this book of five essays, Gordon-Reed (known for her landmark research on Sally Hemings) examines her own past and family, and interrogates what it means to her to be a Black Texan. Starting with her story of being the first Black child to integrate her local school in Conroe, TX, Gordon-Reed reveals the history of lynching and terror inflicted on her family and their neighbors, which haunts them still. She reminds us that Estebanico, a Black Muslim man from Morocco, arrived in present-day Texas a century before the landmark year 1619 that we often recognize as the start of slavery in the U.S. She also examines the role of slavery in luring whites to eventually establish the state of Texas. Gordon-Reed recalls the cultural artifacts that inflected her own youth (the Alamo, Billy Jack, Six Flags over Texas, and the Yellow Rose of Texas, for example) and uncovers their hidden histories of race. Her stories about her family's Juneteenth celebrations show that the holiday is uniquely Texan, even as it has now spread across the nation. VERDICT This beautifully written memoir makes the case that the history of Black Texas is central to the history of the United States. Gordon-Reed's writing will move all readers of U.S. history.—Kate Stewart, Tucson

Pulitzer-winner Gordon-Reed (The Hemingses of Monticello) interweaves history, politics, and memoir in these immersive and well-informed essays reflecting on the history of Juneteenth. She places the story of June 19, 1865, the day (two years after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation) when African Americans in Galveston, Tex., learned they were free, in the context of the bargain struck between settler Stephen F. Austin and the Mexican government in the 1820s to allow chattel slavery in what became east Texas, and notes that after winning independence from Mexico in 1836, Texans pushed for annexation into the U.S. in order to protect themselves from the rising tide of abolitionism. Gordon-Reed also describes the "oddity of being on display" as the first student to integrate schools in her hometown of Conroe, sketches the history of Indigenous peoples in the region, and discusses the story behind the song "The Yellow Rose of Texas," which was based on a (likely false) legend that Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna lost the Battle of San Jacinto because he was "distracted" by a "beautiful woman of color" spying for the Texas revolutionaries. 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. (May)