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.

Around 1811, Jefferson wrote a letter to his granddaughter Cornelia Jefferson Randolph, which contained a list of twelve “Canons of Conduct in Life” – rules to live by, in essence. In 1825 he sent the same list, minus two rules, to a baby boy named Thomas Jefferson Smith in response to a request from the child’s father.

A Wall Street Journal story on Jefferson's influence on decorator and former White House design consultant Carleton Varney.

Dancing, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “is a healthy exercise, elegant and very attractive for young people.”

I found something the other day which has turned out to be very interesting indeed.

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).

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.

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. 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.