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GIVE NOWBack in the 1920s, when the nascent Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (my current employer, now called the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc., and not to be confused with the Monticello Association or the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association) was trying to scrape together the cash to purchase Monticello from Jefferson Monroe Levy, they found themselves a little short.
Maybe we don’t have Jefferson’s actual letters here at the Jefferson Library, but we have other cool stuff – oh yes we do! One perhaps less showy-cool but nonetheless important sort of thing we have here is books, correspondence, and research notes from a lot of the great Jefferson scholars.
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.
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