Monticello Blog

Thomas Jefferson, just thirty-two at the time, was in Philadelphia serving on the Continental Congress when he sat down to write this letter to his brother-in-law Francis Eppes. On 26 June 1775 – after hearing the first reports of what would later become known as the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Guest blogger and Monticello enthusiast Derek Baxter -- who ran the Montalto Challenge 5K race on May 3rd -- opines about whether our third president would have run himself.

While Jefferson could not have foreseen the technological advances that have resulted in many environmental issues today, he does express his thoughts on intergenerational obligations and the earth in his famous Rights of Usufruct and Future Generations.

As a gentleman farmer, Thomas Jefferson was among the most forward thinking of his peers – he grew fruit trees grafted onto dwarfing rootstock, championed native species, imported European varieties, commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition for flora, and was the earliest American to reference garden plants widely found at nursery centers today. But perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of Jefferson’s plantsmanship was his use of microclimate – something that took nearly 170 years to fully appreciate.

Today, I am pleased to announce Monticello has received a $10 million gift from David M. Rubenstein, philanthropist and Co-CEO of The Carlyle Group.

The Wall Street Journal highlights the work of Monticello Research Librarian Anna Berkes and misquoting Jefferson.

CBS Sunday Morning took an in-depth look at how Monticello is telling the story of slavery—from our landmark exhibition Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty to our Slavery at Monticello tours.

"It's as close as you can get to a conversation with Thomas Jefferson.”

Here at the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, we spend most of our days reading Jefferson’s two-hundred-year-old mail. Jefferson wrote approximately 19,000 letters during his lifetime, so you can imagine how many more letters he also received! And that means we have a lot of different handwriting to navigate.

What gives spurious quotes away as "fakes." When we used to receive questions about these, we would often know right away that it wasn't a genuine excerpt from Jefferson's writings. How did we know?