History by a Hair: Thomas Jefferson, Sally Hemings, and Solving a 200-Year-Old Mystery

In 2011, staff at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History discovered a hair, light red in color and possibly human, between the pages of an unpublished manuscript by Thomas Jefferson. That hair sparked an unprecedented scientific quest: Could advances in modern genomics recover Jefferson’s DNA and finally resolve the enduring question of the paternity of the children of Sally Hemings, one of hundreds of African Americans enslaved at Monticello? Richard Kurin, Smithsonian distinguished scholar, reveals the decade-and-a-half-long genomic investigation that settles the historical record.