Pursuits of Knowledge

Due to overwhelming interest, these events have been moved from the David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center to Monticello’s iconic West Lawn. A spacious tent will provide comfortable seating for all in attendance.

Both performances: 6:00 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Experience the passion and ideals that inspired a revolution and the birth of a new nation through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson and his good friend, fellow revolutionary and political rival, John Adams. Written by Howard Ginsberg and based on his original play, Jefferson & Adams is the moving and powerful dramatization of the remarkable friendship between two presidents of the United States, with the forthright Mrs. Adams always playing a major role. 

Playwright Howard Ginsberg draws from their prolific correspondence to tell the story of the turbulent 52-year friendship between Jefferson, Adams, and Adams’ wife Abigail in a poignant stage performance that combines compelling political thought with passionate personal beliefs. The production features Bill Barker as Thomas Jefferson; Sam Goodyear as John Adams; and Abigail Schumann as Abigail Adams.

About the Performers

Veteran historical actor-interpreter Bill Barker is widely recognized as the nation’s foremost interpreter of Thomas Jefferson. After portraying Thomas Jefferson at Colonial Williamsburg for 26 years, Barker joined the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello in 2019. Barker began interpreting Jefferson in 1984 — fittingly, at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Combining the tools of theater with rigorous historical scholarship, his approach explores Jefferson’s life and times, and how it relates to our world today.

Barker has performed as Jefferson around the country and around the world, at sites including the White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Palace of Versailles, and more. He has been featured as Jefferson in numerous publications including TIME, People, and Southern Living, and has appeared as Jefferson on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN and Comedy Central’s Colbert Report. Monticello guests encounter Barker as Mr. Jefferson in regularly-scheduled programming at Monticello. He also contributes to educational outreach efforts, including electronic field trips and livestream programs, and represents Monticello at special events around the country.

Sam Goodyear has portrayed variously James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Benjamin Rush, Cole Porter, U.S. Grant, and Santa Claus. The figure with whom he most identifies, however, is John Adams, since appearing in the 1995 world premiere production of Jefferson & Adams at the Leatherstocking Theatre Company in Cooperstown, NY. John Adams himself regretted never visiting Monticello, and thus this presentation can be seen as a posthumous wish come true.

Abigail Schumann is a Virginia-based actor and living history performer, and a past recipient of the Women in American History Award, presented by the Daughters of the American Revolution, for her work interpreting women’s lives through performance.

In celebration of Civic Season at Monticello, join us for a conversation with bestselling historian and Pulitzer Prize finalist H.W. Brands on his book, Founding Partisans: Hamilton, Madison, Jefferson, Adams and the Brawling Birth of American Politics, a revelatory history on the shocking emergence of vicious political division at the birth of the United States.

To the framers of the Constitution, political parties were a fatal threat to republican virtues. They had suffered the consequences of partisan politics in Britain before the American Revolution, and they wanted nothing similar for America. Yet parties emerged even before the Constitution was ratified, and they took firmer root in the following decade. In Founding Partisans, Brands crafts a fresh and lively narrative of the early years of the republic as the Founding Fathers fought one another with competing visions of what our nation would be.

About the Author

H. W. Brands holds the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair in history at the University of Texas at Austin. He writes on American history and politics, with books including Founding Partisans, Our First Civil War, and The Zealot and the Emancipator.

Several of his books have been bestsellers; two, Traitor to His Class and The First American, were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.