In this week's edition of Endnotes, we take a look at John Garrison Marks' Thy Will Be Done, about Americans’ long, fraught struggle to come to terms with Washington’s legacy of slavery.

Here's how the book came together:

John Garrison Marks

Author

“Our recent arguments about how to remember the founding fathers’ involvement in slavery may seem new, but nothing could be further from the truth. Americans have been arguing about George Washington and slavery for nearly 250 years.”

Dan Mandel

President, Sanford J. Greenburger Associates

“John wrote one of the most engaging query letters I have received in some time. Publishers are always on the lookout for authors who can bring history to life, and I was very excited to discover someone who could also be so mindful of the contemporary reader.”

Andrew Kinney

Executive Editor, University of North Carolina Press

“Marks’s book stood out from the crowd. There is an endless stream of books about Washington, but Marks’s keen sense of the American public’s shifting relationship with our first president gave his writing such a distinctive perspective. It was obvious that his book would tell us something new.”

Lindsay Starr

Art Director, University of North Carolina Press

“The author secured permission from Titus Kaphar to use his painting Absconded from the Household of the President of the United States. Kaphar’s layered composition is the centerpiece: a traditional portrait of Washington overlaid with a shredded reproduction of his 1796 runaway ad for Ona Judge. That visual tension—portrait and erasure—perfectly echoes the book’s interrogation of historical silences.”