An outspoken participant in the civil rights movement, Roger
Wilkins served as Assistant Attorney General during the Johnson
administration. In 1972 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize along
with Bernstein and Herblock for his coverage of Watergate. Yet this
black man, who has served the United States so well, feels at times
an unwelcome guest here.
In Jefferson''s Pillow, Wilkins returns to America''s beginnings
and the founding fathers who preached and fought for freedom, even
though they owned other human beings and legally denied them their
humanity. He asserts that the mythic accounts of the American
Revolution have ignored slavery and oversimplified history until
the heroes, be they the founders or the slaves in their service,
are denied any human complexity.
Wilkins offers a thoughtful analysis of this fundamental paradox
through his exploration of the lives of George Washington, George
Mason, James Madison, and of course Thomas Jefferson. He discusses
how class, education, and personality allowed for the institution
of slavery, unravels how we as Americans tell different sides of
that story, and explores the confounding ability of that narrative
to limit who we are and who we can become.
An important intellectual history of America''s founding,
Jefferson''s Pillow will change the way we view our nation and
ourselves.
關於作者:
Roger Wilkins, currently the Clarence J. Robinson Professor of
History at George Mason University, was cited in the 1972 Pulitzer
Prize award to The Washington Post for his coverage of Watergate.
He serves on the school board of the District of Columbia and lives
in Washington, D.C.