“.... knowledge is power, ... knowledge is safety, ... knowledge is happiness”
-Thomas Jefferson to George Ticknor, 1817
Join us for our ongoing Pursuits of Knowledge series exploring the enduring legacy of curiosity, innovation, and learning inspired by Thomas Jefferson, and the people and paths that created the United States.
Food and beverages, including award-winning Jefferson Vineyards wine, will be available for purchase.
Event Details
- Concessions and seating open at 5:30pm and the program begins promptly at 6pm.
- Meet the author and book signing available after the program.
- Complimentary parking is available at the David M. Rubenstein Visitor Center
About the Book
Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
The deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon.
Being Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History is the deepest dive yet into the heart and soul, secret affairs, unexplored alliances, and bitter feuds of a generally worshipped, intermittently reviled American icon from accomplished Jefferson scholar and biographer Andrew Burstein. A prolific historian of early American politics and culture long specializing in the life of the mind in bygone times, Burstein peels back the curtain on Jefferson. He shows the most articulate of the founding generation to have been a seductive, quietly ambitious theoretician who privately wavered “between involvement and retreat, between conviction and irresolution,” he writes.
Thomas Jefferson is nearly as famous for his unfathomability as for his mighty pen. He was both a gifted wordsmith and a bundle of nerves. His superior knowledge of the human heart is captured in personal correspondence as well as in the impassioned appeal he brought to the Declaration of Independence, but as a champion of the common man who lived a life of privilege on a mountaintop plantation of his own design, he has eluded biographers who have sought to make sense of his contradictory inner life. In Being Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Burstein’s close examination —of Jefferson’s rich, visceral, metaphorical language and the impulses he tries to hide—peels away layers of artifice, taking us past the veneer of the animated letter-writer to describe a confused lover and a misguided humanist who could never bring himself to embrace antislavery.
As assertive in his persecution of political enemies as he was a promoter of harmony, Jefferson was a soft-spoken man who recoiled from direct conflict, but was a master puppeteer in politics, convincing devoted allies to act as surrogates to speak his mind and promote his causes. Yet, whenever he left Monticello, where he could control his environment, he suffered debilitating headaches that plagued him until he finally retired from public life.
What did it feel like to be Thomas Jefferson? Burstein explains the decision to take as his mistress Sally Hemings, the enslaved half-sister of his late wife, who bore him six children, none of whom he acknowledged. Presenting a society that encouraged separation between public and private, appearance and essence, Burstein paints a dramatic picture of early American culture and brings us closer to Jefferson’s life and thought than ever before. He writes that his aim is “not to promote or dethrone, but to explain the talented Jefferson with the tools of the archive, scrupulously examining the dramas and the traumas he faced, along with the triumph he enjoyed.” Being Thomas Jefferson is a revealing study of the inner life of this complicated founding father.
About the Author
Andrew Burstein recently retired from Louisiana State University where he was the Charles P. Manship Professor of History. He is the author of eleven previous books, including The Passions of Andrew Jackson; and Jefferson’s Secrets; along with Madison and Jefferson and The Problem of Democracy. A noted Jefferson scholar and biographer, he was prominently featured in the Ken Burns PBS documentary Thomas Jefferson. He lives in Charlottesville.
About the Moderator
Dr. Andrew M. Davenport is the Vice President for Research and Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. He has published academic articles on Thomas Jefferson’s death and legacies, Ralph Ellison in mid-20th century New York City, and the influence of Black literature on post-World War II French culture. He has also published in Lapham’s Quarterly, Literary Matters, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Smithsonian Magazine.
Davenport serves on the Board of Directors of the American Agora Foundation (Lapham’s Quarterly) and is a member of the inaugural cohort of the White House Historical Association Next-Gen Leadership Ambassadors. He earned a B.A. in English from Kenyon College, an M.A. in American Studies from Fairfield University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in U.S. History from Georgetown University.
