Monticello Blog

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?”

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.

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.

With the coming of Thanksgiving comes also a burble of chatty news stories about the origins thereof, and usually something about turkeys. Not far behind comes some sort of mention of the Founding Fathers, and how they all felt about turkeys. I've seen several of these articles in the last few days and I don't know what else to think but that somebody out there has been working overtime, making up stories about Founding Fathers and turkeys.

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.

If you know anything about Jefferson you will know that nothing is more guaranteed to elicit a long impassioned screed than an infringement on intellectual freedom. Stand back!