Monticello Blog

Leni Sorensen, our African American Research Historian and a culinary historian of national repute, has once again made this month's dish and here we include her notes and pictures.

I recently started thinking about guttae, the small cone-shaped features that are part of the Doric entablature that marches around the entire exterior of the house, including the pediments.

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.

At least once every year I have the unpleasant task of having to tell someone that what they have got is not an original Jefferson document.

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.

Economists have not-as a general rule-been kind to Jefferson or his financial legacy, preferring instead Hamilton for stabilizing the nation’s weak post-war finances and Adams for avoiding costly commercial or military conflict. They have a point, and even sympathetic historians have been hard pressed to justify Jefferson’s trade policies and occasionally irrational fears of the banking system and paper money.

Last September, I received a question from someone looking for a Jefferson letter titled, "The Value of Constitutions." Jefferson didn't usually bother to give his letters titles, so this was a bit puzzling. I finally figured out that this letter had been published in a volume edited by Edward Dumbauld, chapter 4 of which was titled, "The Value of Constitutions." It seemed pretty obvious that somewhere along the way, someone had quoted from the letter and attached the chapter title in such a way that people assumed that it was the title of the letter. Whoopsies.

Did Jefferson really have Asperger's Syndrome? Nope.

The arrival of our annual issue of the Magazine of Albemarle County History is always eagerly awaited. This year's issue has some special visual goodies: possibly the first photographs ever taken of Monticello.