Monticello Blog

Last week, we had the privilege of being the first Monticello staff to set eyes on the more than 70 Jefferson books that we recently discovered at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL).

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.

Jefferson’s granddaughters began venturing “into society” in the 1810s.

There are a lot of stories about Monticello that crept into the lore over the years - mostly after Jefferson died, after all the family had left Monticello, and no one who had lived there during its heyday was around anymore to refute them. One of the most persistent of these stories is one about Jefferson using the Dome Room as a billiard hall.

At the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, we are working to produce the “definitive edition” of Jefferson’s writings and correspondence between his retirement from the presidency in 1809 and his death in 1826. One of the first things the editors of the Retirement Series did when the project began was they compiled a database of all of Jefferson’s letters. Considering how many letters there were, you might wonder how in the world we can account for all his mail now that two hundred years have passed.

I am always interested in, and often entertained by, some of the ways I have seen Jefferson and other “Founding Fathers” portrayed outside of more traditional portraiture.

In 2009, members of the Monticello Archaeology staff teamed up with zoological archaeologist Joanne Bowen from Colonial Williamsburg to present a collaborative academic poster at the Society for American Archaeology annual conference.

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

Yes, it's Ladies of the White House; or, In the Home of the Presidents: Being a Complete History of the Social and Domestic Lives of the Presidents from Washington to Hayes.

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.