Monticello Blog

After my freshman year at Georgetown University I returned to my hometown for a summer internship in the Education and Visitor Programs Department at Monticello.

A while ago I spent a little time (by which I mean maybe 26 hours or so) doing research in response to a patron's question about Mary Jefferson Bolling, Thomas Jefferson's older sister.

Leni Sorensen, our African American Research Historian and a culinary historian of national repute, has once again made this month's dish and here we include her notes and pictures.

Did Thomas Jefferson use Monticello's Dome Room as a billiard hall? And if not him, who did?

Actual proof of a Welsh ancestry for the Jefferson family remains elusive.

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.

I'm currently engaged in a long-term quest to acquire every single item in Frank Shuffelton's epic Thomas Jefferson: A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, 1826-1997.

At least once every year I have the unpleasant task of having to tell someone that what they have got is not an original Jefferson document.

From the Reference Question files: “I’ve heard that Thomas Jefferson was a volunteer firefighter. Is this true?”

Everybody loves countdowns, right? Right. So, I’ve come up with my own list of things people get wrong about Jefferson, based on my extensive observation of the stuff people put on the Internet or ask us about.