Every day I learn from the Twitter account @AfricanArchives

For example, did you know that "James Hemings, brother to Sally Hemings, was the first American to train as a chef in France. He was enslaved by Thomas Jefferson at 8. In May 1784, Hemings received a summons to join Jefferson in Philadelphia. From there they traveled to Paris where he was trained in the art of French cooking. At a time when illiteracy was imposed on all African people, he was not only literate but fluent in English and French."

There's much more at @africanarchives on Twitter.

Thomas Jefferson also owned Sally Hemings, whom he sexually assaulted at least six times.

For more on Sally Hemings and Jefferson, check out The Hemingses of Monticello, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy, both by Annette Gordon-Read. For a discussion of sexual assault during slavery and the legal right to rape enjoyed by slave owners, see Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

Hartman's book was recently reissued after 25 years,

"…Her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the "terrible spectacle" and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history…This 25th-anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson."