A book talk with award-winning historian Robert Pierce Forbes discussing his book, Notes on the State of Virginia: An Annotated Edition from October 12, 2022.
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About the Book
When Thomas Jefferson used the term “my country,” he almost always meant “Virginia.” Nowhere is this truer than in his only published book, Notes on the State of Virginia. This work, published between the end of the Revolution and the drafting of the Constitution, when America was first taking shape, profoundly influenced the ways in which the new republic was perceived, by foreigners and countrymen alike. Robert Pierce Forbes, editor and annotator of an authoritative new edition of Notes, explains how Jefferson realized his Virginian-centered vision of the United States, and revised the soaring affirmation of his Declaration that “all men are created equal.”
About the Author: Robert Pierce Forbes
Robert Pierce Forbes has been an academic and public historian for almost three decades, specializing in the intersection of politics, slavery, and race. After earning a Ph.D. from Yale, he served as the founding associate director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, and has taught at Yale, the University of Connecticut, Wesleyan and Rutgers. At present he is a lecturer at Southern Connecticut State University. He is the author of The Missouri Compromise and its Aftermath: Slavery and the Meaning of America (2007) and an annotated edition of Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (Yale University Press, 2022).