Robert Pierce Forbes discusses his introduction, scholarship, and editorship of Thomas Jefferson’s seminal work, “Notes on the State of Virgina.” Prof. Forbes locates the origin of United States’ racial dynamic in Jefferson’s notes on race. Specifically, how Jefferson, against the popular notions of his contemporaries, reverses the victimization of the slave to the slave master. This rhetorical move revolutionized how intellectuals of his day conceptualized white supremacy.
Robert Pierce Forbes taught U.S. history at the University of Connecticut and was the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. He is the author of The Missouri Compromise and Its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America. He lives in New Haven, CT.
