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Declaration House

€19.99
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1776
250
250th
African American
American History
Black
Category=AGT
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
Category=WQH
collateral descendants
Declaration House
Declaration of Independence
enslavement
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
essays
Founders
Founding Fathers
Freedom
Hemmings
Independence National Historical Park
indigenous
installation
interviews
Jefferson
memory
Monticello
Monument Lab
monumental
Philadelphia
photography
photos
plantation
poem
poetry
prose
Public Art
Public History
Robert Hemmings
semiquincentennial
slavery
Sonya Clark
The Descendants of Monticello
Thomas Jefferson
United States
valet
white

Product details

  • ISBN 9781439927649
  • Weight: 454g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 22 May 2026
  • Publisher: Temple University Press,U.S.
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

During the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, Thomas Jefferson and enslaved valet Robert Hemmings spent several months at 700 Market Street in Philadelphia. The editors and contributors to Declaration House reflect on the history of this site and illuminate the entangled legacy of freedom and enslavement at the core of our nation's founding. They expand our history by revisiting and mapping this historic place in the city and nation, past and present, as a way to tend to our democracy today.


At the center of the book is artist Sonya Clark's revelatory public artwork "The Descendants of Monticello," a multichannel video installation created in collaboration with Hemmings' collateral descendants and others who are related to the hundreds of people enslaved at Monticello. Interviews and essays about the project and the site consider history, memory, and the founding of our country. Like Clark's project, Declaration House asks the timely question, "What does the Declaration of Independence mean to us today?"

Contributors: Niya Bates, Kerry Bickford, Paul Buchanan, Sonya Clark, Andrew M. Davenport, Kai Davis, Husnaa Haajarah Hashim, J. Calvin Jefferson Sr., Jabari Jefferson, Jane Kamensky, Matthew Kenyatta, Salamishah Tillet, Gayle Jessup White, Auriana Woods, and the editors
About
Anna Arabindan-Kesson is Associate Professor of Black Diasporic Art at Princeton University. She is the author of Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton and Commerce in the Atlantic World, which won the 2023 Historians of British Art Award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800 and 1960.

Paul M. Farber is Director and Co-Founder of Monument Lab. Farber is the author or coeditor of several books including Monument Lab: Re:Generation (Temple) and A Wall of Our Own: An American History of the Berlin Wall.

Yolanda Wisher is the Senior Curator at Monument Lab. She is the author of the poetry collection Monk Eats an Afro and was named inaugural Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania in 1999 and Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016. A Pew and Cave Canem Fellow, Wisher received the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award in 2019 for her commitment to art for social change. In 2022, she was named a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Artist Fellow.