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Posts in: A Summary View

November 22, 2011

How to Spot a Fake

by Anna Berkes

It seems that the glory days of spurious Jefferson quotations have gone. Rarely do we get these types of questions any more. Now that we are experiencing a breather on that front, I've had the chance to ponder the phenomenon a bit.more »

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August 17, 2011

Mary, Mary

by Anna Berkes

Question mark icon over a silhouette of Mary's sister Martha Jefferson Carr.

A while ago I spent a little time (by which I mean maybe 26 hours or so) doing research in response to a patron's question about Mary Jefferson Bolling, Thomas Jefferson's older sister. Sometimes I get a little bit Captain Ahab when I'm doing research.more »

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April 18, 2011

Not in Sympathy

by Anna Berkes

I’ve spent the last several months going through the library’s files, neatening things up, eliminating duplicates and inconsistencies, and generally satisfying my compulsion to organize things and make sure everything is spelled correctly. I found something the other day which has turned out to be very interesting indeed. Before I get to that though, I have to explain a bit of background.more »

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January 4, 2011

That Pesky Billiard Table

by Anna Berkes

Photograph showing corner of billiard table in the Dome Room

There are a lot of stories about Monticello that crept into the lore over the years - mostly after Jefferson died, after all the family had left Monticello, and no one who had lived there during its heyday was around anymore to refute them. These stories found their way into popular literature and are still coming back home to roost, so to speak, in the form of queries from visitors. One of the most persistent of these stories is one about Jefferson using the Dome Room as a billiard hall.more »

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October 18, 2010

On the Welshness

by Anna Berkes

In his Autobiography, Jefferson wrote: The tradition in my father’s family was that their ancestor came to this country from Wales, and from near the mountain of Snowdon, the highest in Gr. Br. I noted once a case from Wales in the law reports where a person of our name was either pl. or def. and one of the same name was Secretary to the Virginia company. These are the only instances in which I have met with the name in that country. more »

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September 26, 2010

Smells Like the Perfume of Purity and Saintly Sweetness

by Anna Berkes

The latest Shuffelton item to cross my desk is quite the Victorian jewel. No, really. You should see the cover. In fact, here it is: more »

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September 5, 2010

Oddly Precise

by Anna Berkes

I'm currently engaged in a long-term quest to acquire every single item in Frank Shuffelton's epic Thomas Jefferson: A Comprehensive, Annotated Bibliography of Writings About Him, 1826-1997.more »

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August 22, 2010

Eternal Vigilance

by Anna Berkes

Virginia Free Press and Farmers' Repository, May 2, 1833

Much as I love debunking Jefferson quotations that were probably made up by college students last week on Facebook, it’s somewhat more intellectually stimulating to revisit some venerable old spurious quotes. There’s a whole slew of these that are routinely attributed to Jefferson and various others, and you’ll see most of them dealt with in all the standard quotation references. Whatever the apparent vintage of the spurious quote, however, I find that it behooves me to keep searching for them at regular intervals. Those heroic scannemore »

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July 23, 2010

A Little Piece of Monticello

by Anna Berkes

Back 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. So they conceived a cunning plan, of course – they woulmore »

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July 8, 2010

TJ, Fireman?

by Anna Berkes

From the Reference Question files: “I’ve heard that Thomas Jefferson was a volunteer firefighter. Is this true?” If I had better PhotoShop skills, I would whip up a picture of TJ wearing a firehat. You all will just have to imagine how funny that would be. Well, now we have to be serious, because you never know when the seemingly-unbelievable story happens to be true, and then we have egg on our face if it turns out we’ve made too much fun of the story.more »

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