Prepared in 1821. Apparently first published in the Memoir, correspondence, and miscellanies, from the papers of Thomas Jefferson, Charlottesville, 1829.
The definitive life of Jefferson in one volume, this biography relates Jefferson's private life and thought to his prominent public position and reveals the rich complexity of his development. As Peterson explores the dominant themes guiding Jefferson's career--democracy, nationality, and enlightenment--and Jefferson's powerful role in shaping America, he simultaneously tells the story of nation coming into being.
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.
In The Mind of Thomas Jefferson, one of the foremost historians of Jefferson and his time, Peter S. Onuf, offers a collection of essays that seeks to historicize one of our nation’s founding fathers. Challenging current attempts to appropriate Jefferson to serve all manner of contemporary political agendas, Onuf argues that historians must look at Jefferson’s language and life within the context of his own place and time. In this effort to restore Jefferson to his own world, Onuf reconnects that world to ours, providing a fresh look at the distinction between private and public aspects of his character that Jefferson himself took such pains to cultivate. Breaking through Jefferson’s alleged opacity as a person by collapsing the contemporary interpretive frameworks often used to diagnose his psychological and moral states, Onuf raises new questions about what was on Jefferson’s mind as he looked toward an uncertain future. Particularly striking is his argument that Jefferson’s character as a moralist is nowhere more evident, ironically, than in his engagement with the institution of slavery. At once reinvigorating the tension between past and present and offering a new way to view our connection to one of our nation’s founders, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson helps redefine both Jefferson and his time and American nationhood.
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“Jefferson aspired beyond the ambition of a nationality, and embraced in his view the whole future of man.”—Henry Adams Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) left a vast literary legacy in the form of journal entries, notes, addresses, and seventy thousand letters. This extraordinary volume represents many of his most important contributions to American political thought. It features his Autobiography, which contains the original and revised versions of the Declaration of Independence; the Anas, or Notes (1791–1809); Biographical Sketches; selections from Notes on the State of Virginia, the Travel Journals, and Essay on Anglo-Saxon; a portion of his public papers, including his first and second inaugural addresses; and more than two hundred letters. Taken together, these writings offer indispensable insight into the mind of the man who was instrumental in formulating and guiding this nation’s principles. From the Preface: This selection from the writings of Thomas Jefferson is planned to be a comprehensive presentation of his thought. The greatest amount of space has been allotted to his letters, in the belief that they are of primary importance in revealing the man and his intellect. Jefferson’s two original full-length works, the Notes on Virginia and the Autobiography, are given virtually complete. Along with his best-known public papers, selections from his minor writings are also included. Together, all these serve to depict the man who more aptly than any of his countrymen might be called the American Leonardo.
Dumas Malone wrote his first 15,000 word essay about Jefferson for the scholarly Dictionary of American Biography. This reprint is Malone's own revision of that essay, made after his decades of study of a remarkable American.
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.
An ambitious, perceptive portrayal of a complex man, this bestselling biography breaks new ground in its exploration of Jefferson's inner life. "Brodie has humanized Jefferson without in the least diminishing him".--Wallace Stegner. Photos.