Monticello Blog

I wasn't aware that Jefferson thought about intelligent design, but as we all know, if you use Thomas Jefferson's name in your argument, you automatically win. Double points for including a relevant quotation.

Did Jefferson really have Asperger's Syndrome? Nope.

In honor of Presidents' Day, I tried really hard to think of some Abraham Lincoln-themed material for this post, but the best I could come up with was a blurb about a work of fiction set during George Washington's presidency.

It is claimed, by websites and other sources various and sundry, that Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing of a meteorite crash in Connecticut in 1807 and its subsequent reportage by two professors at Yale, scoffed that it "was easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven."

A patron asked us about a very unusual quotation the other day: apparently someone, sometime said that Thomas Jefferson was "...a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father..."; this was supposedly a comment made by Jefferson's political opponents in the election of 1800.

Picking up a recent Economist magazine, an article discusses how desalination of the oceans for usable water is becoming less expensive these days. What does this have to do with Jefferson?

One of our informants encountered a story, related by one Thomas Bloomer Balch, a Presbyterian minister recalling that in his childhood in the D.C. area during Mr. Jefferson's presidency, a little boy wandered onto the grounds of the President's House and was killed by TJ's "ill-tempered goat."

Jefferson was an accomplished amateur violinist and an avid concertgoer who once declared music is "the passion of my soul." This time we present a selection of music related to Jefferson and Monticello, ranging from popular tunes to classical pieces.