Seeing Jefferson Anew

Author : John B. Boles
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813929970
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Seeing Jefferson Anew written by John B. Boles and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2010-08-31 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Jefferson’s ideas have been so important in shaping the character and aspirations of the United States that it has proven impossible to think about the state of the nation at almost any moment without implicit or explicit reference to his words and actions. In similar fashion, each generation has understood Jefferson in the context of the central issues of its time. Jefferson has, for better or for worse, been a man for all seasons. The essays in this collection seek to update and reevaluate several key aspects of Jefferson’s attitudes and policies in light of the newest research and at the same time take care to consider his ideas about such controversial topics as race, gender, and religion in the context of his own time and place. Simultaneously, the contributing authors analyze the relevance of Jefferson for our own age, conscious of how contemporary judgments about slavery, religion, and Native Americans, for example, shape our coming to terms with the nation’s history. Here is no simple search for a usable past, but instead a tough-minded but fair examination of a complex man who in fundamental ways represents both the promise and the problems of the American experience. ContributorsJohn B. Boles, Rice University * Thomas E. Buckley, Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University at Berkeley * Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University * Randal L. Hall, Rice University * Peter J. Kastor, Washington University at St. Louis * Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University * Peter S. Onuf, University of Virginia * Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy, Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies * Adam Rothman, Georgetown University * Eva Sheppard Wolf, San Francisco State University

Author : John B. Boles
Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 0465094694
Total Pages : 640 pages
Book Rating : 4.91/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jefferson written by John B. Boles and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-04-25 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Magisterial . . . perhaps the finest one-volume biography of an American president." --Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post "[A] splendid biography." --Wall Street Journal "The fullest and most complete single-volume life of Jefferson since Merrill Peterson's thousand-page biography of 1970." --Gordon Wood, Weekly Standard 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.

Author : Robert M. S. McDonald
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813942926
Total Pages : 500 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thomas Jefferson's Lives written by Robert M. S. McDonald and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Who was the "real" Thomas Jefferson? If this question has an answer, it will probably not be revealed reading the many accounts of his life. For two centuries biographers have provided divergent perspectives on him as a man and conflicting appraisals of his accomplishments. Jefferson was controversial in his own time, and his propensity to polarize continued in the years after his death as biographers battled to control the commanding heights of history. To judge from their depictions, there existed many different Thomas Jeffersons. The essays in this book explore how individual biographers have shaped history—as well as how the interests and preoccupations of the times in which they wrote helped to shape their portrayals of Jefferson. In different eras biographers presented the third president variously as a proponent of individual rights or of majority rule, as a unifier or a fierce partisan, and as a champion of either American nationalism or cosmopolitanism. Conscripted to serve Whigs and Democrats, abolitionists and slaveholders, unionists and secessionists, Populists and Progressives, and seemingly every side of almost every subsequent struggle, the only constant was that Jefferson’s image remained a mirror of Americans’ self-conscious conceptions of their nation’s virtues, values, and vices. Thomas Jefferson’s Lives brings together leading scholars of Jefferson and his era, all of whom embrace the challenge to assess some of the most important and enduring accounts of Jefferson’s life. Contributors:Jon Meacham, presidential historian * Barbara Oberg, Princeton University * J. Jefferson Looney, Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello * Christine Coalwell McDonald, Westchester Community College * Robert M.S. McDonald, United States Military Academy * Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University * Jan Ellen Lewis, Rutgers University * Richard Samuelson, California State University, San Bernardino * Nancy Isenberg, Louisiana State University * Joanne B. Freeman, Yale University * Brian Steele, University of Alabama at Birmingham * Herbert Sloan, Barnard College * R. B. Bernstein, City College of New York * Francis D. Cogliano, University of Edinburgh * Annette Gordon-Reed, Harvard University * Gordon S. Wood, Brown University

Author : Matthew Crow
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108155987
Total Pages : 295 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection written by Matthew Crow and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-17 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative book, historian Matthew Crow unpacks the legal and political thought of Thomas Jefferson as a tool for thinking about constitutional transformation, settler colonialism, and race and civic identity in the era of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson's practices of reading, writing, and collecting legal history grew out of broader histories of early modern empire and political thought. As a result of the peculiar ways in which he theorized and experienced the imperial crisis and revolutionary constitutionalism, Jefferson came to understand a republican constitution as requiring a textual, material culture of law shared by citizens with the cultivated capacity to participate in such a culture. At the center of the story in Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, Crow concludes, we find legal history as a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, and as a way of instituting a particular form of legal subjectivity.

Author : M. Andrew Holowchak
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110619105
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.02/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thomas Jefferson’s Bible written by M. Andrew Holowchak and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2018-11-19 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is the first full-length book that offers a critical investigation into the composition of Jefferson’s Bible. In it, the author looks critically not only at what Jefferson includes, but also at what he chose to exclude in an effort to uncover the principles that Jefferson employed in selecting and deselecting verses. In addition to providing a full text of Jefferson’s Bible, this study places these documents within a historical, philosophical and theological context that illuminates their significance and relevance to our time.

Author : Keith Thomson
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300187408
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jefferson's Shadow written by Keith Thomson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIV In the voluminous literature on Thomas Jefferson, little has been written about his passionate interest in science. This new and original study of Jefferson presents him as a consummate intellectual whose view of science was central to both his public and his private life. Keith Thomson reintroduces us in this remarkable book to Jefferson's eighteenth-century world and reveals the extent to which Jefferson used science, thought about it, and contributed to it, becoming in his time a leading American scientific intellectual. With a storyteller's gift, Thomson shows us a new side of Jefferson. He answers an intriguing series of questions—How was Jefferson's view of the sciences reflected in his political philosophy and his vision of America's future? How did science intersect with his religion? Did he make any original contributions to scientific knowledge?—and illuminates the particulars of Jefferson's scientific endeavors. Thomson discusses Jefferson's theories that have withstood the test of time, his interest in the practical applications of science to societal problems, his leadership in the use of scientific methods in agriculture, and his contributions toward launching at least four sciences in America: geography, paleontology, climatology, and scientific archaeology. A set of delightful illustrations, including some of Jefferson's own sketches and inventions, completes this impressively researched book. /div

Author : Henry Wiencek
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1466827785
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.83/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Master of the Mountain written by Henry Wiencek and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-10-16 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Master of the Mountain, Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money. So far, historians have offered only easy irony or paradox to explain this extraordinary Founding Father who was an emancipationist in his youth and then recoiled from his own inspiring rhetoric and equivocated about slavery; who enjoyed his renown as a revolutionary leader yet kept some of his own children as slaves. But Wiencek's Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the "silent profits" gained from his slaves—and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he'd vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson's grocery bills. Parents are divided from children—in his ledgers they are recast as money—while he composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what some of his friends call "a vile commerce." Many people of Jefferson's time saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had been badly distorted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?

Author : Ernest J. Gaines
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 1400077702
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.00/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Lesson Before Dying written by Ernest J. Gaines and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2004-01-20 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • A deep and compassionate novel about a young man who returns to 1940s Cajun country to visit a Black youth on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Together they come to understand the heroism of resisting. "An instant classic." —Chicago Tribune A “majestic, moving novel...an instant classic, a book that will be read, discussed and taught beyond the rest of our lives" (Chicago Tribune), from the critically acclaimed author of A Gathering of Old Men and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. "A Lesson Before Dying reconfirms Ernest J. Gaines's position as an important American writer." —Boston Globe "Enormously moving.... Gaines unerringly evokes the place and time about which he writes." —Los Angeles Times “A quietly moving novel [that] takes us back to a place we've been before to impart a lesson for living.” —San Francisco Chronicle

Author : Thomas S. Kidd
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300250061
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.60/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Thomas Jefferson written by Thomas S. Kidd and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2022 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is a biography of Thomas Jefferson's life and conflicted moral universe. Jefferson has received increasing historical attention since the late 1990s. Much of the focus on Jefferson has concerned topics including his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings, the "Jefferson Bible," and bitter political rivalries with Alexander Hamilton and many others. Until now, however, no biography has fully explored Jefferson's spiritual beliefs and ethical precepts, and how those ideas did (or did not) sync up with the way Jefferson actually lived. Encapsulated in Jefferson's privileged but fraught life are themes that suffuse American history itself: religious seeking, racial injustice, inspiring ideals, and squalid realities. Employing fresh research in Jefferson's vast papers, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh shows how deeply the Christian culture of Jefferson's upbringing influenced him. It also reveals how he struggled as an adult to find an adequate replacement for the conventional Christianity of his youth, even as he became more entangled in political feuds, personal debt, and the terrible consequences of slaveowning"--

Author : Kerry T. Burch
Publisher : Springer Nature
ISBN 13 : 303045763X
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Jefferson’s Revolutionary Theory and the Reconstruction of Educational Purpose written by Kerry T. Burch and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-05-27 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book newly interprets the educational implications of Thomas Jefferson’s revolutionary thought. In an age where American democracy is imperilled and the civic purposes of schooling eviscerated, Burch turns to Jefferson to help bring to life the values and principles that must be recovered in order for Americans to transcend the narrow purposes of education prescribed by today’s neoliberal paradigm. The author argues that critical engagement with the most radical dimensions of Jefferson’s educational philosophy can establish a rational basis upon which to re-establish the civic purposes of public education. Bracketing the defining features of Jefferson's theory throughout each of the chapters, the author illuminates the deficiencies of the dominant educational paradigm, and charts a new path forward for its progressive renewal.