Humboldt and Jefferson

Humboldt and Jefferson

Author: Sandra Rebok

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2014-05-05

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0813935709

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Humboldt and Jefferson explores the relationship between two fascinating personalities: the Prussian explorer, scientist, and geographer Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the American statesman, architect, and naturalist Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826). In the wake of his famous expedition through the Spanish colonies in the spring of 1804, Humboldt visited the United States, where he met several times with then-president Jefferson. A warm and fruitful friendship resulted, and the two men corresponded a good deal over the years, speculating together on topics of mutual interest, including natural history, geography, and the formation of an international scientific network. Living in revolutionary societies, both were deeply concerned with the human condition, and each vested hope in the new American nation as a possible answer to many of the deficiencies characterizing European societies at the time. The intellectual exchange between the two over the next twenty-one years touched on the pivotal events of those times, such as the independence movement in Latin America and the applicability of the democratic model to that region, the relationship between America and Europe, and the latest developments in scientific research and various technological projects. Humboldt and Jefferson explores the world in which these two Enlightenment figures lived and the ways their lives on opposite sides of the Atlantic defined their respective convictions.


The Limits of Optimism

The Limits of Optimism

Author: Maurizio Valsania

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2011-08-03

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 0813931517

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The Limits of Optimism works to dispel persistent notions about Jefferson’s allegedly paradoxical and sphinx-like quality. Maurizio Valsania shows that Jefferson’s multifaceted character and personality are to a large extent the logical outcome of an anti-metaphysical, enlightened, and humility-oriented approach to reality. That Jefferson’s mind and priorities changed over time and in response to changing circumstances indicates neither incoherence, hypocrisy, nor pathology. Valsania’s reading of Jefferson, the Enlightenment, and negativity helps to make sense of the many paradoxes typically associated with that eighteenth-century thinker. At the same time, it provides a corrective to the common though erroneous equation of Enlightenment thinking with rationalism and shallow optimism.


Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment

Jefferson, Nationalism, and the Enlightenment

Author: Henry Steele Commager

Publisher: ACLS History E-Book Project

Published: 2015-01-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 9781628200959

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A collection of essays and lectures from Henry Steele Commager, one of America's eminent historians. The focus is on the age of enlightenment, with particular attention to Thomas Jefferson, and how enlightenment philosophy shaped the birth of the United States.


Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment

Thomas Jefferson's Enlightenment

Author: James C. Thompson

Publisher: Commonwealth Books of Virginia

Published: 2015-06-15

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 0990401847

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“Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment – Background Notes” is a self-contained collection of seventeen essays. Author James Thompson envisioned it originally as a supplement for his earlier book, “Thomas Jefferson’s Enlightenment – Paris 1785.” Readers will find in these detailed “background notes” a feast of little known facts, seldom noted events, and forgotten relationships. As they peer into historical nooks and crannies that only the author seems to know about, they will develop a new insight into the circumspect political loner who drafted the Declaration of Independence alone in his Philadelphia rooms. They will see how “enlightenment’ transformed Thomas Jefferson into the engaged social progressive who later waged and won the Second American Revolution. In this collection of notes, the author discusses the factors that shaped the man who went to France, the people he encountered there, the city he came to know, the circles he entered, the ideas they discussed, and other topics relating to this fascinating period in Jefferson’s life. By examining the motives and objectives that guided him through his day-to-day affairs, Mr. Thompson brings welcome clarity to an image that somehow became murky.


Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment

Jesus in an Age of Enlightenment

Author: Jonathan C. P. Birch

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-07-18

Total Pages: 506

ISBN-13: 1137512768

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This book explores the religious concerns of Enlightenment thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Thomas Jefferson. Using an innovative method, the study illuminates the intellectual history of the age through interpretations of Jesus between c.1650 and c.1826. The book demonstrates the persistence of theology in modern philosophy and the projects of social reform and amelioration associated with the Enlightenment. At the core of many of these projects was a robust moral-theological realism, sometimes manifest in a natural law ethic, but always associated with Jesus and a commitment to the sovereign goodness of God. This ethical orientation in Enlightenment discourse is found in a range of different metaphysical and political identities (dualist and monist; progressive and radical) which intersect with earlier ‘heretical’ tendencies in Christian thought (Arianism, Pelagianism, and Marcionism). This intellectual matrix helped to produce the discourses of irenic toleration which are a legacy of the Enlightenment at its best.


"Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination

Author: Annette Gordon-Reed

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-04-13

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1631490788

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New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle Finalist for the George Washington Prize Finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Award A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection "An important book…[R]ichly rewarding. It is full of fascinating insights about Jefferson." —Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs" is one of the richest and most insightful accounts of Thomas Jefferson in a generation. Following her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello¸ Annette Gordon-Reed has teamed with Peter S. Onuf to present a provocative and absorbing character study, "a fresh and layered analysis" (New York Times Book Review) that reveals our third president as "a dynamic, complex and oftentimes contradictory human being" (Chicago Tribune). Gordon-Reed and Onuf fundamentally challenge much of what we thought we knew, and through their painstaking research and vivid prose create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one "comprised of equal parts sun and shadow" (Jane Kamensky).


The Jefferson Bible

The Jefferson Bible

Author: Thomas Jefferson

Publisher: Courier Corporation

Published: 2012-03-02

Total Pages: 98

ISBN-13: 0486112519

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Jefferson regarded Jesus as a moral guide rather than a divinity. In his unique interpretation of the Bible, he highlights Christ's ethical teachings, discarding the scriptures' supernatural elements, to reflect the deist view of religion.


Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History

Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History

Author: Hannah Spahn

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0813931681

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Beginning with the famous opening to the Declaration of Independence ("When in the course of human events..."), almost all of Thomas Jefferson's writings include creative, stylistically and philosophically complex references to time and history. Although best known for his "forward-looking" statements envisioning future progress, Jefferson was in fact deeply concerned with the problem of coming to terms with the impending loss or fragmentation of the past. As Hannah Spahn shows in Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, his efforts to promote an exceptionalist interpretation of the United States as the first nation to escape from the "crimes and calamities" of European history were complicated both by his doubts about the outcome of the American experiment and by his skepticism about the methods and morals of eighteenth-century philosophical history. Spahn approaches the conundrum of Jefferson's Janus-faced, equally forward- and backward-oriented thought by discussing it less as a matter of personal contradiction and paradox than as the expression of a late Newtonian Enlightenment, in a period between ancient and modern modes of explaining change in time. She follows Jefferson in his creation of an influential narrative of American and global history over the course of half a century, opening avenues into a temporal and historical imagination that was different from ours, and offering new assessments of the solutions Jefferson and his generation found (or failed to find) to central moral and political problems like slavery.


Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson

Author: Christopher Hitchens

Publisher: HarperCollins UK

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0007213727

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Hitchens brings the character of Jefferson to life as a man of his time and also as a symbolic figure beyond it. Conflicted by power, Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and acted as Minister to France yet yearned for a quieter career in the Virginia legislature. Predicting that slavery would shape the future of America's development, this professed proponent of emancipation continued to own human property. He negotiated the Louisiana Purchase with France, doubling the size of the nation, and authorized the Lewis and Clark expedition, opening up the American frontier. The Barbary War, a lesser-known chapter of his political career, led to the building of the U.S. Navy and the fortification of America's reputation regarding national defense. In the background is the fledgling nation's struggle for independence, formed in the crucible of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and, in its shadow, the deformation of that struggle in the excesses of the French Revolution.


Inventing America

Inventing America

Author: Garry Wills

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2017-02-15

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13: 0385542836

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From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" —(Edmund S. Morgan, New York Review of Books)