Monticello Blog

Building upon more than 50 years of archaeological investigation and documentary research, Monticello staff is now in the process of interpreting and restoring Mulberry Row. Lined with more than 20 dwellings, workshops, and sheds, Mulberry Row was the constantly-changing hub of the 5,000-acre Monticello plantation.

Thomas Jefferson was fascinated by astronomy and owned several astronomical instruments during his lifetime, including an orrery - that is, a mechanical model of the solar system.

Much as I love debunking Jefferson quotations that were probably made up by college students last week on Facebook, it’s somewhat more intellectually stimulating to revisit some venerable old spurious quotes. There’s a whole slew of these that are routinely attributed to Jefferson and various others, and you’ll see most of them dealt with in all the standard quotation references.

Taylor Stoermer on the curious current trend among a particular group of state officials to invoke Jeffersonian “states’ rights” principles to “nullify” federal laws with which they disagree.

Peter Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia (and a great friend of Monticello) wrote a thought-provoking piece about the nature of Americans' views of liberty from the earliest days of the republic.

Kerry James Marshall describes his murals of Monticello and Mount Vernon.

I wasn't aware that Jefferson thought about intelligent design, but as we all know, if you use Thomas Jefferson's name in your argument, you automatically win. Double points for including a relevant quotation.

There is almost always a tiny little wave of rhetorical consultations of TJ in reaction to each big news story.

To our detriment, Jefferson's "wall of separation" concept has often been grossly misapplied to individual speech that references religion.