Monticello Blog

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!

Kerry James Marshall describes his murals of Monticello and Mount Vernon.

While Jefferson remained a practicing Episcopalian, his personal faith veered towards Unitarianism.

Several years ago, a visitor to Monticello emailed me and asked about something they'd seen in the Jefferson family graveyard, just a short walk down from Mulberry Row: Thomas Jefferson's gravestone seemed to be covered with coins. What's that about? (one might well ask).

A new intriguing book on the shelves: Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi, by Chandra Mukerji. This dovetails nicely with one of our TJ Encyclopedia articles, which features an itinerary of Jefferson's travels through southern France and Italy - during which, yes, he visited the Canal du Midi.

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.

There is almost always a tiny little wave of rhetorical consultations of TJ in reaction to each big news story.

I received a book which I feel certain will set many scholarly hearts aflutter here: Incidental Architect: William Thornton and the Cultural Life of Early Washington, D.C., 1794-1828, by Gordon S. Brown

To our detriment, Jefferson's "wall of separation" concept has often been grossly misapplied to individual speech that references religion.

Reference question: For whom is Carolina Ramsay Randolph (Thomas Jefferson's great-granddaughter, daughter of his oldest grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph) named?