Jefferson
Jefferson

Author: John B. Boles

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2017-04-25

Total Pages: 529

ISBN-13: 0465094694

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From an eminent scholar of the American South, the first full-scale biography of Thomas Jefferson since 1970 Not since Merrill Peterson's Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation has a scholar attempted to write a comprehensive biography of the most complex Founding Father. In Jefferson, John B. Boles plumbs every facet of Thomas Jefferson's life, all while situating him amid the sweeping upheaval of his times. We meet Jefferson the politician and political thinker -- as well as Jefferson the architect, scientist, bibliophile, paleontologist, musician, and gourmet. We witness him drafting of the Declaration of Independence, negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, and inventing a politics that emphasized the states over the federal government -- a political philosophy that shapes our national life to this day. Boles offers new insight into Jefferson's actions and thinking on race. His Jefferson is not a hypocrite, but a tragic figure -- a man who could not hold simultaneously to his views on abolition, democracy, and patriarchal responsibility. Yet despite his flaws, Jefferson's ideas would outlive him and make him into nothing less than the architect of American liberty.

Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867
Literature and Music in the Atlantic World, 1767-1867

Author: Catherine Jones

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2014-07-16

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 074868462X

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This new study looks at the relationship of rhetoric and music in the era's intellectual discourses, texts and performance cultures principally in Europe and North America. Catherine Jones begins by examining the attitudes to music and its performance by leading figures of the American Enlightenment and Revolution, notably Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She also looks at the attempts of Francis Hopkinson, William Billings and others to harness the Orphean power of music so that it should become a progressive force in the creation of a new society. She argues that the association of rhetoric and music that reaches back to classical Antiquity acquired new relevance and underwent new theorisation and practical application in the American Enlightenment in light of revolutionary Atlantic conditions. Jones goes on to consider changes in the relationship of rhetoric and music in the nationalising milieu of the nineteenth century; the connections of literature, music and music theory to changing models of subjectivity; and Romantic appropriations of Enlightenment visions of the public ethical function of music.

Confounding Father
Confounding Father

Author: Robert M. S. McDonald

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2016-08-29

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 081393897X

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Of all the founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson stood out as the most controversial and confounding. Loved and hated, revered and reviled, during his lifetime he served as a lightning rod for dispute. Few major figures in American history provoked such a polarization of public opinion. One supporter described him as the possessor of "an enlightened mind and superior wisdom; the adorer of our God; the patriot of his country; and the friend and benefactor of the whole human race." Martha Washington, however, considered Jefferson "one of the most detestable of mankind"--and she was not alone. While Jefferson’s supporters organized festivals in his honor where they praised him in speeches and songs, his detractors portrayed him as a dilettante and demagogue, double-faced and dangerously radical, an atheist and "Anti-Christ" hostile to Christianity. Characterizing his beliefs as un-American, they tarred him with the extremism of the French Revolution. Yet his allies cheered his contributions to the American Revolution, unmasking him as the now formerly anonymous author of the words that had helped to define America in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, meanwhile, anxiously monitored the development of his image. As president he even clipped expressions of praise and scorn from newspapers, pasting them in his personal scrapbooks. In this fascinating new book, historian Robert M. S. McDonald explores how Jefferson, a man with a manner so mild some described it as meek, emerged as such a divisive figure. Bridging the gap between high politics and popular opinion, Confounding Father exposes how Jefferson’s bifurcated image took shape both as a product of his own creation and in response to factors beyond his control. McDonald tells a gripping, sometimes poignant story of disagreements over issues and ideology as well as contested conceptions of the rules of politics. In the first fifty years of independence, Americans’ views of Jefferson revealed much about their conflicting views of the purpose and promise of America. Jeffersonian America

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 33
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 33

Author: Thomas Jefferson

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 810

ISBN-13: 0691184844

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Under normal circumstances, Thomas Jefferson would have had more than two months to prepare for his presidency. However, since the House of Representatives finally settled a tied electoral vote only on 17 February 1801, he had two weeks. This book, which covers the two-and-a-half-month period from that day through April 30, is the first of some twenty volumes that will document Jefferson's two terms as President of the United States. Here, Jefferson drafts his Inaugural Address, one of the landmark documents of American history. In this famous speech, delivered before a packed audience in the Senate Chamber on March 4, he condemns "political intolerance" and asserts that "we are all republicans: we are all federalists," while invoking a policy of "friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none." Jefferson appoints his Cabinet members and deals with the time-consuming process of sifting through the countless appeals and supporting letters of recommendation for government jobs as he seeks to reward loyal Republicans and maintain bipartisan harmony at the same time. Among these letters is one from Catharine Church, who remarks that only women, excluded as they are from political favor or government employment, can be free of "ignorant affectation" and address the president honestly. Jefferson also initiates preparations for a long cruise by a squadron of American warships, with an unstated expectation that their destination will probably be the Barbary Coast of the Mediterranean.

Inventing the Job of President
Inventing the Job of President

Author: Fred I. Greenstein

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-08-10

Total Pages: 177

ISBN-13: 1400831369

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How the early presidents shaped America's highest office From George Washington's decision to buy time for the new nation by signing the less-than-ideal Jay Treaty with Great Britain in 1795 to George W. Bush's order of a military intervention in Iraq in 2003, the matter of who is president of the United States is of the utmost importance. In this book, Fred Greenstein examines the leadership styles of the earliest presidents, men who served at a time when it was by no means certain that the American experiment in free government would succeed. In his groundbreaking book The Presidential Difference, Greenstein evaluated the personal strengths and weaknesses of the modern presidents since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Here, he takes us back to the very founding of the republic to apply the same yardsticks to the first seven presidents from Washington to Andrew Jackson, giving his no-nonsense assessment of the qualities that did and did not serve them well in office. For each president, Greenstein provides a concise history of his life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Washington, for example, used his organizational prowess—honed as a military commander and plantation owner—to lead an orderly administration. In contrast, John Adams was erudite but emotionally volatile, and his presidency was an organizational disaster. Inventing the Job of President explains how these early presidents and their successors shaped the American presidency we know today and helped the new republic prosper despite profound challenges at home and abroad.

The Road to Monticello
The Road to Monticello

Author: Kevin J. Hayes

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2008-07-01

Total Pages: 750

ISBN-13: 0199758484

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Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer--a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president. In The Road to Monticello, Kevin J. Hayes fills this important gap by offering a lively account of Jefferson's spiritual and intellectual development, focusing on the books and ideas that exerted the most profound influence on him. Moving chronologically through Jefferson's life, Hayes reveals the full range and depth of Jefferson's literary passions, from the popular "small books" sold by traveling chapmen, such as The History of Tom Thumb, which enthralled him as a child; to his lifelong love of Aesop's Fables and Robinson Crusoe; his engagement with Horace, Ovid, Virgil and other writers of classical antiquity; and his deep affinity with the melancholy verse of Ossian, the legendary third-century Gaelic warrior-poet. Drawing on Jefferson's letters, journals, and commonplace books, Hayes offers a wealth of new scholarship on the print culture of colonial America, reveals an intimate portrait of Jefferson's activities beyond the political chamber, and reconstructs the president's investigations in such different fields of knowledge as law, history, philosophy and natural science. Most importantly, Hayes uncovers the ideas and exchanges which informed the thinking of America's first great intellectual and shows how his lifelong pursuit of knowledge culminated in the formation of a public offering, the "academic village" which became UVA, and his more private retreat at Monticello. Gracefully written and painstakingly researched, The Road to Monticello provides an invaluable look at Jefferson's intellectual and literary life, uncovering the roots of some of the most important--and influential--ideas that have informed American history.

American Democracy in Crisis
American Democracy in Crisis

Author: Jeanne Sheehan

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-01-02

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 3030622819

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Public disenchantment with and distrust of American government is at an all-time high and who can blame them? In the face of widespread challenges—everything from record levels of personal and national debt and the sky high cost of education, to gun violence, racial discrimination, an immigration crisis, overpriced pharmaceuticals, and much more—the government seems paralyzed and unable to act, the most recent example being Covid-19. It’s the deadliest pandemic in over a century. In addition to an unimaginable sick and death toll, it has left more than thirty million Americans unemployed. Despite this, Washington let the first round of supplemental unemployment benefits run out and for more than a month were unable to agree on a bill to help those suffering. This book explains why we are in this situation, why the government is unable to respond to key challenges, and what we can do to right the ship. It requires that readers “upstream,” stop blaming the individuals in office and instead look at the root cause of the problem. The real culprit is the system; it was designed to protect liberty and structured accordingly. As a result, however, it has left us with a government that is not responsive, largely unaccountable, and often ineffective. This is not an accident; it is by design. Changing the way our government operates requires rethinking its primary goal(s) and then restructuring to meet them. To this end, this book offers specific reform proposals to restructure the government and in the process make it more accountable, effective, and responsive.