Remembering Daniel P. Jordan, 1938 - 2024

Jane Kamensky: Good evening, friends. Welcome back. Welcome back to the mountaintop to celebrate the profound legacy of Dr Daniel P. Jordan, who led the Thomas Jefferson Foundation for 23 years from 1985 to 2008. I'm Jane Kamensky, and it's the honor of my career to be here as Monticello's president, twice removed from Dan in the lineage, which makes me something like a professional grandchild.

Dan retired 16 years ago, and he passed unexpectedly almost six months ago, leaving an enormous void. Yet, I hope that we all feel his presence here tonight. We can hardly help, but do so since we gather in the place that Dan built. If you drove here down the Thomas Jefferson Parkway, Dan built that. If you stopped at the Visitor Center on your way up to the mountaintop, Dan built that. If you glimpsed the restored vegetable gardens in their autumn majesty off to my left, Dan built that. If you look behind you on the way out to the majesty of Montalto, Dan made sure that nobody else would build that.

And the list goes on and on. Our scholarly enterprise at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, the Jefferson Library, the Getting Word African American Oral History Project, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, the curatorial and exhibitions program, all of it.

Consider this: the Foundation had no endowment before Dan began one. The funds he began raising, especially after 1993, were the acorns that have become all manner of tall oak trees now sheltering all of Monticello's work. We will follow the truth where it leads, Dan wrote in the late 1990s when a fuller understanding of Jefferson's family, black and white, had begun to move from family stories to scholarly consciousness. Hat tip to my colleague Annette Gordon Reed, who's here with us tonight, and finally to public awareness.

Dan knew that truth rested on a bedrock of scholarship, and so the ICJS hired top historians and pioneered fellowship programs that nurtured the career paths of scholars across numerous disciplines: history, political theory, archeology, African American studies, architecture, the decorative arts, all of these revealing facets of Jefferson's world.

Dan also ensured that at Monticello quite uniquely among historical sites across the world, cutting edge scholarship would infuse visitor-facing education. Monticello has stayed true to that vision, which is one of the reasons our guests profess such trust in our interpretation. I'm delighted to be able to share with you for the first time, publicly, a plan, a foot at the Foundation to perpetually commemorate Dan's bold commitment to truth through scholarship.

With generous support from several of you who are here tonight, we are in the process of designing the Daniel P. Jordan Archaeology Research and Collections Complex at the Robert H. Smith Center for Jefferson Studies.

We're going to build that for Dan. This group is the first to see these renderings, and I hope you'll come back and be among the first to see the building in relatively short order.

It was Dan who elevated archaeology at Monticello into a world class program. The department and its impact on guests and on its field has grown tremendously in the years since. Yet the spaces housing our collections and our peerless staff have simply not kept pace. The new Jordan complex will house our world class archaeological experts and collections, as well as other researchers on the Kenwood campus just down the road. It will help to bring that campus even more fully to life as a collaborative hub and as a walking destination for our guests and community members.

Like Dan's style of leadership, the complex will be both elegant and modest, high impact and enduring. We'll share more details about the project as it comes together in the next weeks and months.

You're going to hear more about the living legacy of Dan's commitment to scholarly excellence from our speakers tonight. I'll be brief with my introductions. The QR code on your program links you to further speaker bios. The first conversation will feature the Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series, which Dan boldly liberated from Princeton more than two decades ago, and which will soon published its 21st volume.

Ann Lucas, our Senior Historian Emerita, whose scholarship infused Monticello's history and exhibitions work for more than 30 years will be in conversation with Jeff Looney, the inaugural Daniel P. Jordan Editor, and the founding editor of the Papers Project. Then, we'll move into a conversation about the past, present, and future of the 31-year-old Getting Word African American Oral History Project, which launched under Cinder Stanton and Dr. Dianne Swann-Write in the fateful year of 1993. It was a huge takeoff point in the Foundation.

Archivist J. Calvin Jefferson will talk about the blossoming of the project with soon-to-be-doctor, Andrew M. Davenport, who directs it and leads our African American history program more broadly and is currently serving as the acting Saunders Director of ICJS.

Then we'll hear via video some brief remarks from Ken Burns, known to all of you, and an old friend of Dan, who is very sorry he can't be with us here tonight and was eager to share a couple of reminiscences. When the video wraps, I'll come back to offer a short introduction of our keynote speaker, Ed Ayers.

And with that, I'll turn it over to Ann and Jeff. Thank you.

Ann Lucas: We're on a timer, so we're very conscious of being ejected through the roof of the tent. It is such an honor to be here tonight. I'll just do a little preamble before we start our conversation. With pen and paper, Thomas Jefferson articulated our democracy. His pen described the iconography of a new nation, expanded that nation's horizons, founded and designed the University of Virginia, and designed all that you have seen around you tonight.

Jefferson's pen also enslaved entire families and set some individuals free. As a public historian, Dan Jordan understood the power of all that Jefferson wrote and drew. He also knew that the rich and exceptional documentary record associated with Jefferson set Monticello apart from other historic sites.

That archive continues to be Monticello's strength, our opportunity, our obligation as a center of international research. It was Dan's vision to bring the papers of Thomas Jefferson home. Thank you. Tonight I'm honored to talk with J. Jefferson Looney, the Daniel P. Jordan Editor of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series.

So Jeff, I'll start with the first softball. What exactly are the Jefferson papers? What constitutes the Jefferson papers?

Jeff Looney: Thanks, Ann. The Papers of Thomas Jefferson project began in 1943, the bicentennial of Jefferson's birth. And the vision then was to create the definitive edition of Jefferson's papers.

There had been four earlier so-called complete editions and the great goal, then and now, was for there not to need to be a sixth edition, behind us. The first editor, Julian Boyd up at Princeton, had this idea and had a couple of big starting ideas. One was that he would include everything legitimately Jeffersonian by reason of authorship or association.

And that means that it would include incoming letters, as well as letters [from] Jefferson, which seems like an obvious thing now, but it was a new idea at the time, that you can't really understand Jefferson's letters if you don't have the letters he's responding to. So it would include those, it would include documents and papers, ranging from the Declaration of Independence to a brief plan for the garden. That sort of thing. 

So, the other big idea was he was going to obtain every known text of every Jefferson document. Not just from a big collection or two, but we were going to go track down every known document everywhere in the world, so that now there's a thousand places we've gotten them from, ranging from the Library of Congress to individual owners.

So that was the idea in 1943, and it transformed Jefferson's scholarship, and that was the goal, and it's still the goal. And what makes it so important is that all of those earlier editions put together had only printed about a third of Jefferson's letters. And for the incoming stuff, it was more like one in five that had ever appeared anywhere else.

So that's why this work is so groundbreaking and so important.

Ann Lucas: So, tell us all a little bit about Dan's role in bringing the Papers to Monticello and what his vision was for the project.

Jeff Looney: Well, the goal, the goal was to, we refer to liberating them from Princeton, but they're still happening in Princeton.

The problem was that when we got to the late 1990s, Jefferson isn't even vice president yet. So, after something like 50 years we were still in volume 26 or 25, trying to get Jefferson beyond that. So, Dan felt that we had to figure out a way to get this thing done in somebody's foreseeable lifetime. And, and he became and so he began negotiating with Princeton.

And the idea was not to take it away from Princeton. It was to enable the work to continue in Princeton, but to figure out how to double the rate of progress. And the way to do that, he worked out, decided was to clone the project so they would still keep doing what they're doing in Princeton. And meanwhile, he would bring a whole staff down here, starting with me, and we would we would get going on that.

The vision was to make sure that when we got started, we would have the resources and the time, money, and the patience on the part of everybody to get the thing done. We would get a volume a year out once we got started, and that has worked. So at this point thanks to Dan's vision, we have, in those 20 volumes, printed 11,500 documents, and more than 16,000 printed pages.

And we have four volumes to go to get Jefferson to his last day. This all came out of that, that idea that we needed to negotiate with Princeton in a way that we work collaboratively. And we've, it's never been a competition. We've worked very closely with them throughout. But that's what made that all possible.

And it's also a key thing, which he knew, in really a key step in transforming Monticello from a house museum into a major research institution. And that, that was all part of the original plan.

Ann Lucas: Well, I, I thought it might be fun to hear Dan's version of how this happened. And I had the great privilege to interview him for his oral history last August. And in our session, he described the origin of the Retirement Series. And Dan would say that it all came about because of the work of many hands.

You all know that's how Dan felt and thought. His colleagues who helped him build what he called a resource board with members like Dick Gilder, first Martin Davis, and then Luella Davis, Rod Rockefeller, and his good friend David McCullough. So this is the quote from my oral history with Dan. He said:

"One day in a board meeting that was dull and slow, Dick said, Dick Gilder said, David McCullough's got some thoughts about the publication of the Jefferson Papers at Princeton, and I think we should hear what he has to say.

So David jumps in, and David had very strong feelings about this, and he said, 'They're not averaging a book published every five or six, seven years. I mean, it's been X number of years before they've had a book. They're only in the 1780s. Jefferson lives until 1826. The project will never be completed. I think that Monticello should do something about it.'

Well, Dick jumps in and says, "If we don't do what David said, we should resign as a board and go home." So it got everybody's attention. And then at the break, I said to Dick, 'That was quite a statement.' He said, 'I was just throwing out red meat.'"

Dan finished off by saying, "With a board made up of people like Dick and David, we felt we could do anything. And in fact, we did."

So, how do the Papers contribute to scholarship, both here at Monticello, but in a larger scholarly community?

Jeff Looney: One of the things that made it exciting to bring the Retirement Series here and part of the vision that they had was to divide it in such a way that we got the retirement years. [It's] that those 17 years he's in retirement are the longest he ever spent at Monticello. He's at Monticello that whole time.

And so the effect of bringing these volumes here and starting to get them out was huge because we didn't have access to almost any of this written material. And so it was crucially important in the years we've been doing this to make this material available to the Monticello staff and researchers here.

And they turned to these volumes every day. If we hadn't started when we started, we'd still be in about 1806, which is where we are in Princeton right now. And they're, they're doing great things, but we would not have any of this material available to our, our people here.

If we go beyond that to our effect overall worldwide, the beauty of the Jefferson Papers and the way, the reason I thought I had really lucked out when I found myself working on the retirement rather than the presidency, is that instead of a lot of diplomatic documents, what we've got is this enormous variety. We've got Jefferson's correspondence with John Adams, which is one of the great literary treasures of this whole period. We've got the letters and papers with which Jefferson does everything involved in starting the University of Virginia. He lobbies, he designs the buildings, practically turns on the lights, he orders the books for the library.

But we've also got this huge range of incoming material. We've got Jefferson corresponding with people about the proper pronunciation of ancient Greek. We've got a guy writing Jefferson and saying, "Here's the Latin translation of the Declaration of Independence I just put together." And we'll be printing that. And we've got sometimes, somewhat long and rambling, and it's kind of hard to understand, religious rants from people, which Jefferson writes on the back, "Insane." But we print those too. And so, it's what makes it fun to come to work every day, is you don't know what the next document is going to be. But they're all interesting, because in retirement, Jefferson can write about whatever interests him, and everything does.

As far as the outreach. Dan always said, "research drives the mission." But the beauty of what we're doing now is we also planned on Dan's watch for a digital future, and 18 of our volumes are now online, free to anyone in the world. And eventually all the volumes will be. And that means that anyone anywhere will be able to benefit from this, and we're gonna make sure that's true forever.

And so I always say this talk, people are tired of hearing it: "Most of our readers aren't born yet." And that was part of Dan's vision, too.

Ann Lucas: So what's on the horizon for the Papers, and what do you want to see in the 2026 era?

Jeff Looney: Well, you can look at the short term, the middle term, and the long term. In the short term, the goal is to get the last several volumes of the Retirement Series done.

I'd like to say that when Jefferson ends his retirement, I get to begin mine. So, we're working very hard to get to that point. The the second, the middle range goal, is to find a way for the Foundation to be involved hopefully take the lead in truly finishing the Jefferson Papers. Because the original plan was for there to be two series, the chronological series. Which they started in Princeton, and now they're finishing while we're finishing it. But also the second series, which is stuff that doesn't fit chronologically as well. And we've published several volumes of that over the years, but there's still several to go and that would include a new edition of his Farm Book, which we're expanding into a big database of everything known about every enslaved person in Monticello. And beyond that, there's the architectural drawings, there's legal papers, there's a lot of stuff involved in bringing the overall vision to fruition.

So I think in my perfect world, we would here at Monticello be helping to make that happen while our friends in Princeton are finishing the presidency. And then the long-term vision is that they will finish up in Princeton, and we will ultimately become the stewards of the digital and paper collection for the entire phase of his life. We're negotiating with Princeton for that to happen. We'll still be involved with, they'll still be involved, but the idea is that archive would come down here. And it would be the only place in the world where everything Jefferson could be found. This is the obvious place for it.

And the last point to make about that is that we will always have someone here to, to tend to what I call the care and feeding of this collection and that will be the permanently endowed position. And that is the Daniel P. Jordan Editorship. And that could not be more aptly named for a man who is so important to bringing this project here.

Andrew Davenport: They gave us ten minutes. We can do a lot of damage in ten minutes. We can have a lot of fun in ten minutes talking about Daniel Jordan's legacy.

I'm Andrew Davenport, the acting Director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies. Calvin Jefferson and I are colleagues with the Getting Word African American Oral History Project.

And just to put a really fine point on what Jeff and Anne were talking about with the Paper Series, it's the foundation of every aspect of Jefferson scholarship and early American scholarship as well. Study of slavery at Monticello and beyond, study of horticulture, political economy, anything about the early Republic and Thomas Jefferson, the Paper Series is critically important and it helps us as historians and archivists of slavery and its legacies learn more about the period as well.

So thinking about how the Papers intersects with all of the different projects of ICJS. But tonight we're here to talk about the Getting Word Project, which was founded 31 years ago in 1993 and Calvin, I was in short pants at the time.

So you'll have to tell us a little bit about what it was like as a researcher, as a descendant of enslaved people before the Getting Word Project, before the fruits of it were formed in the mind of Cinder Stanton and Dr. Dianne Swann-Wright and encouraged by Dan Jordan, what was it like as a researcher before Getting Word Project in the 70s and 80s? And what was it like after the Getting Word Project was founded?

Calvin Jefferson: I started doing my family research in 1978. My son was 10 and we started together. I started with the the story that one of my cousins told me and she told me that we were from Virginia. She didn't know where from Virginia. So I had to look at the census records. And at that time, the census records is not like you see it today. You can't put in a name and pull up the information.

I had to go through the county of Virginia to find out that we came from Albemarle County. And from there I decided, well, let me go down to the courthouse and see if I can find some records. And, just so happens Jay's mother's family was from Charlottesville and Albemarle County. So I went down with Jay's grandfather and we searched for records.

And I kept coming across one record of this guy named Robert Hughes, who was marrying people. So, I said, "No that can't be the same Robert Hughes I'm looking for." So when I get back home, I call my cousin up, and I said, "Was Robert Hughes a minister?" And she says, "Yes baby, he founded a church down in Charlottesville."

And that kind of, you know, she knew that information, but she didn't tell me because I didn't ask the right questions. Doing genealogy, you have to ask the right questions. So I came back down here with Jay's grandfather and we found a church. And the church was at Edgehill Farms, adjacent to that, so it was on the land owned by Thomas Jefferson's grandson. So I kind of stalled right there, because I couldn't get back past Edge Hill.

Then one day, one of my mother's friends, childhood friends, said, "You should contact Monticello. They're doing research on people who were enslaved here." Well, I have this infamous last name, Jefferson, and I think the reason why mama's friend told me to do that is because of mama's married name.

So I called up and talked to Cinder. And I told Cinder my story about my great-great-grandfather, Robert. And she says, "Well, I don't know anything about that." And right there I was kind of stuck, and I decided to put it aside. And that's exactly what I did until, I got a call from another cousin.

And that cousin told me, "Calvin, Cinder is looking for you. She lost your telephone number." So I called Cinder up, and we talked, and she told me exactly who Robert Hughes was. Robert Hughes was the the child of Wormley Hughes, who was the grandson of Elizabeth Hemings. And that's what started me off knowing exactly where my family came from. So, that's how I got interested in what was going on at the Foundation.

Andrew Davenport: So you spend decades looking for your family's story in slavery, and after the founding of the Getting Word Project, and after Cinder finds your phone number, she gets back in touch with you, and is able to complete that circle for you, and answer questions that you've had for a long part of your life.

And then you initiate your son into what's happening at Monticello, the interpretation here. You've also initiated your grandchildren into the Getting Word Project and everything that we do here at Monticello. You're also a colleague here. You were the first phone call that I made when I began directing Getting Word three years ago because of your sage advice, your sense of humor, and your good looks, too, you know.

But I want to ask you about your interactions with Dan Jordan, too. Because this is critical, coming from the president of the Foundation, meeting someone he doesn't know, but who knows about Monticello and wants to know more about his family, and is a stakeholder in the 90s and beyond here, who has a lifelong, in fact, centuries-long, entanglement with his history.

What was it like meeting Dan Jordan?

Calvin Jefferson: It was very interesting. When I was introduced to Dan, he knew my family history. He knew that I was descended from not just the Hemings family but the Granger family. He knew that. He, and this is my observation of not just me, but other descendants. He knew your first name. He knew your last name. He knew your family history. And every time we talked, he would invite me to come down, and he would walk with me over to Tufton, where the Grangers were living.

So he was very, let me say this part again. I know historians because I had to work with historians at the National Archives. He was a true historian. He didn't forget anything. He had a foresight of where he wanted to go with the history and you could tell that. If you had to work with historians that came to your research room and looked at the records that you had and would abuse your records. So you knew what historians were like. And he was a consummate historian and I appreciated that.

And I also liked that he never forgot a name, you know, never forgot a name. And he always would talk to you on a personal basis but at the same time, if you know anything about history, it was a historical basis, too. So, to me, it was a delight working with Dan, you know. 

And I saw some of the things that he did to support his staff, because he really supported Dianne and Cinder. They really had a person that had their back all the time, even through some of the research that they were doing. So he was, he was great.

Andrew Davenport: Calvin and I spend a lot of time in the Special Collections in the Jefferson Library and I was looking in records relative to the 1990s and especially around the Dr. Eugene Foster DNA study and the controversy around Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson's paternity of her children and, obviously, Annette Gordon Reed's pivotal works. And in 1998, after the Foster study is released in Nature magazine, and the film crews are coming to Monticello, Dan is preparing his remarks for what he's going to offer to the cameras.

And apparently, in his first drafts, he would write whatever came to mind. And so, in the benefit, with the Special Collections, the benefit is you can see all of the drafts that Dan left leaving the office. In the first draft, and I think it's November, early November 1998, just after the Foster study is released, and it's controversial to segments of the American population, and Dan writes and he says, "Good morning, these are my opening remarks, I'm the president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, and I'm here because I drew the short straw."

And of course he's trying to figure out what he's going to say and by the end, by his final remarks, by his final draft, he comes around to the line that Jane referenced earlier, that "we will follow the truth wherever it may lead," and what an enduring legacy he has left for all of us.

Calvin, you were there more or less at the beginning of the Getting Word Project, you're one of many hundreds of people to participate in the project. We research slavery at Monticello, we conduct oral histories with descendants, we've done over 350 interviews with participants in the last 31 years, about 80 just in the past couple of years, thanks to renewed funding from from the Mellon Foundation especially, and we do community outreach, especially doing oral history workshops, meeting people where they are in their local communities. We travel and meet descendants there and through a Promise Grant program, which is a scholarship program for for folks who participate in the Getting Word Project.

You were there at the beginning, you've been with us for a couple of years. I have my thoughts about the future, but given your 30 plus year engagement with the project and that your grandchildren participate, and your grandson is a advisor to Monticello Young Advisors, what are your hopes?

Calvin Jefferson: From what I can see from the oral history project, it's a lot of information there. And also, but then the information that shows you the survival instincts of the people who were enslaved here. And that information is a wealth of information that scholars eventually will have access to, to really write some history about the people that were here.

One of the things that I've discovered is that you have a couple of the descendants that were active in the Civil Rights Movement. And the pre-Civil Rights Movement. When I was in school, one of the people that I fell in love with was Monroe Trotter. Monroe Trotter is the descendant of Elizabeth Hemings. And I didn't know that at the time, because I didn't know my ancestor, but seeing him, and if you don't know who Monroe Trotter is, he was the person that organized a demonstration at the White House when they showed the film Birth of A Nation. He also was part of the Niagara movement that ended up becoming the NAACP even though he did not go with the NAACP, he was a part of the Niagara movement.

So this person is very, very important when you do American history, and I've found other people have done the same thing. You have a person who was a legislator in California in the in the 50s. So these are people that came from here and there are other examples of people like that that come from here, too.

So I'm hoping that part of the the scholarly program where people will start writing about the people of African descent that were here because someone, like I said, some of them have become very important to United States history, and that really is important to me.

Andrew Davenport: Thank you, Calvin. And we are at time. Thank you so much for your time, Calvin, for your wisdom, and we'll continue the work.

And thanks so much to Dan Jordan's leadership more than 30 years ago for encouraging his staff and the brilliant idea, Cinder Stanton's idea, to begin an oral history project to learn more about life at Monticello, but also especially life after Monticello, and life in freedom in the United States for people of African descent here. It's an an unbelievable archive of American freedom that we have here, and it's thanks in large part because Dan encouraged his staff onward. Thank you.

Ken Burns: Hello, everyone. I'm Ken Burns. I'm so sorry I could not join you today in person. Memory is sometimes an act of celebration. We ask ourselves and our friends and family to come together and pause to recognize something or someone who changed our lives for the better. I met Dan Jordan many, many years ago, even before I began working on our film about Thomas Jefferson, and we were able to spend so many precious hours at Monticello with Mr. Jefferson and Dan.

He was then, and for years before and after, the ultimate student and gentleman, someone who appreciated the value of scholarship and the importance of history, as well as an educator who realized that learning is a lifelong pursuit and education is the foundation of our republic. Dan elevated the Thomas Jefferson Foundation and by extension Monticello to one of our country's premier history institutions, more than a collection of buildings and artifacts, as important as they are, but as a light that helped us uncover and understand our complicated past. He did this in partnership with many: scholars who visited the collections, visitors, benefactors, and filmmakers.

But he also did this with his wife, Lou, and his family. We all feel his loss today and extend our love and thoughts to Lou and their children and now grandchildren. Even during my time with Dan, which was mostly focused on Jefferson and his legacy, he spoke often of his family, something I think inspired him to dedicate his life to educating others. Dan also spoke about his time in the military, the people he met, the inspiration he felt, and the commitment to the country and one another that was formed there.

There's much more we can learn from and about our founders. But as we do so, we must recognize that we are fortunate to have stewards, people who can guide us, engage us, and expose us to stories and information that we would otherwise not have access to.

I will always remember Dan with great fondness and admiration. I'll always appreciate how he opened Monticello to me and the entire country. As we remember Dan, I hope we will celebrate him every day by recommitting ourselves to the study of our past and its lessons for our future.

Jane Kamensky: Thank you to Ken and to our panelists for stories of the past that are also calls to action for the future.

I do want to say I think it is a competition with Princeton, and we won. But that's a, maybe a minority opinion.

It's downright daunting to introduce our keynote speaker, Edward Ed Ayers, perhaps the nation's leading historian of the Civil War and of the New South, the region that made Dan and that Dan helped to remake in turn.

I could introduce Ed as a prize-winning author of In the Presence of Mine Enemies, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Beveridge Prize. The Promise of the New South, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and The Thin Light of Freedom, which won the Lincoln Prize among many other prizes and many other books.

I could introduce him as a university leader. Ed is President Emeritus of the University of Richmond and before that was Professor of History and Dean of Arts and Sciences here at UVA. He is also past president of the Organization of American Historians.

I could introduce him as a pioneering digital scholar whose Civil War mapping project, Valley of the Shadow, helped to originate the field of digital humanities. Ed's current digital project, New American History, serves thousands of teachers and hundreds of thousands of students with free, excellent historical resources.

Which underlines perhaps the most important point in this illustrious and indeed daunting biography. Ed Ayers is a teacher and a citizen. The Carnegie Foundation recognized him as National Professor of the Year, The American Historical Association decorated him with the James Harvey Robinson Prize for outstanding aid to teaching history, and in the biggest prize of all, Barack Obama be-ribboned him in 2013 with the National Humanities Medal in recognition to his commitment to, quote, making our history as widely available and accessible as possible.

That's a commitment that Ed shared over many years with his friend and colleague Dan Jordan. Ladies and gentlemen, Ed Ayers.

Ed Ayers: Especially interesting after that introduction, Jane, might you have taken my lecture with you?

Audience: Laughter

Ed Ayers: Follow Ken Burns and my notes disappear. All the pieces are coming together here.

Audience: Laughter

Ed Ayers: And that follows the anxiety that's built ever since I've been here as I meet and re meet so many friends of myself and of Dan and realize the responsibility that I've been handed tonight. So I appreciate your patience.

If you met Dan Jordan for five minutes, you met the real Dan Jordan. He was the same person all the time with everyone. We can all testify from the experiences of many people over many years that Dan's generosity of spirit, gentle sense of humor, profound humanity, and deep wisdom were always evident.

These same words appear over and over again in the testimonials from people who work with Dan every day. He was genuinely modest and probably wouldn't want us to dwell on such things this evening. They're not in doubt. Everybody knows it will be long remembered.

But also evident on a first meeting with Dan was that he was a southerner. Even foreign dignitaries could probably pick up on his lovely Mississippi accent. As somebody with a less lovely Tennessee accent I was somewhat in envy of that accent that both Dan and Lou so eloquently unfurled on every occasion to such great effect. Lou, great ally at every step, brought the same spirit of welcome and graciousness to everything they did, embodying the best part of Southern culture. The part that's unpretentious and democratic, and it takes everybody as they are.

Now, Dan certainly did not flinch from Southern history. He knew well the suffering and injustice the South had brought for so many, for so long. And knew well the role that Thomas Jefferson had played in that suffering. But Dan and his allies did not stop with that recognition, that frank acknowledgment of wrong. For that was not all of the story.

Dan and people who work here and knew that Thomas Jefferson was a global importance of an enduring importance with visions of religious freedom that could not be more important than they are today. At the same time, Dan and his colleagues worked to acknowledge the full humanity of the many black people who lived and worked all around this house, on these grounds, along Mulberry Row.

Thanks to the work of many here at Monticello, work that continues, the enslaved black men and women of Monticello have emerged in the shadows of history to reveal their own character and identities and aspirations and accomplishments.

Now Dan's accomplishments at Monticello unfold as a story, building on one another with a clear narrative line. Under his leadership, Monticello would devote itself to discovery and to sharing that discovery.

Dan began his tenure by creating an education department, followed thereafter by a research center, and an African American advisory panel. And one of the most important steps, as we've heard tonight, I'm touched that my old friend, Cinder Stanton, and my former student, Dianne Swann-Wright, were able to begin getting word. And I can remember when Diane called me and the excitement she had knowing that she was embarking upon this great adventure. A story that has now 350 interviews. I've learned more than when I wrote the lecture. That this is still an unfolding story with so many discoveries yet to come. That same year, the Plantation Community Tours, now known as Slavery at Monticello Tours, began.

So, in addition to this public facing scholarship, Dan knew the importance of new knowledge, of new discovery, through patient research and writing. The International Center for Jefferson Studies has hosted more than 500 researchers and writers. The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, as you've heard, adopted the Papers of Thomas Jefferson, through whatever means you want to call that relationship.

Monticello created the [Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery], excavations of the Betty Hemings site and the Monticello home farms, and a ceremony of commemoration that marked the enslaved burial ground.

Now Dan was a fine and productive writer. But when he came to Monticello, he channeled his scholarly energies into a different kind of scholarship. It was an embodied scholarship, an enacted scholarship, a public scholarship. During his time here, Monticello's history expanded into the world, into the histories of other nations and times and places. But that history also expanded within, to interior worlds, domestic worlds, intimate worlds, unspoken worlds, buried worlds.

In that profound work, Dan embodied all that being a scholar at its best demands and offers. Here's what that means, though he created much that was new. Dan knew he built upon the work of many who came before him. Every day we're collaborating. With people who had the same crazy idea we did 50 - 100 years ago, we talk with them and build on their work. And he knew he built alongside those with whom he worked every day. And he knew he built for those who would follow.

Scholarship is about following, as you've heard at least twice tonight, truth wherever it may lead, just as Jefferson himself said. Many of the truths discovered through scholarship disheartened and angered many people as they came to light. But Dan explained and defended those truths with gentle firmness. He showed that Monticello mattered more as a result of the knowledge that came. Scholarship has its own moral code of honesty and fearlessness and empathy and respect for evidence. Monticello led with truth and worried about public relations afterwards. We will never have a simple Thomas Jefferson again. That is a hard won and invaluable accomplishment.

Scholarship is created for others, for the future, for unseen collaborators to come. It is built in the faith that others will build on and challenge what we might learn. Scholarship embodies our longing, our need to get outside of ourselves to find a non-parochial truth. Monticello has built the places and the means to generate that new knowledge. Scholarship is inherently revisionist. For we revise, we improve our understanding as we learn more.

Under Dan’s leadership, Monticello never stopped revising its history. And there is no expectation that the revision will stop. We need revisionist history just as we need revisionist medicine. I always want to know what's the latest thing that you've learned.

Scholarship is open to evidence in whatever form it may appear whether in documentary editing or DNA profiles, in faint traces in the soil, or the eloquence and pain in oral histories. Monticello uses every form of historical understanding, weaving them together in an ever more powerful and inclusive story. Scholarship is about preservation through renewal. The past has to be reborn with each generation, or it will fade and erode.

Preservation is not simply leaving a place alone, but actively nurturing it. Monticello today looks more as it did 200 years ago than it did when Dan arrived several decades ago. It speaks to us more powerfully as a result.

Scholarship is about taking advantage of what our own time in history presents us. And Monticello has been at the forefront in its use of new technologies and forms of connections with one of the first websites of a historical site, the World Wide Web, digital archives and advanced archaeology and acoustic tours, the latest strategies of documentary editing, filmmaking, and more, whatever tool might lay at hand. Monticello is willing to pick it up and see what it might do. A respect for the past means the embrace of the new.

Scholarship, finally, is about taking what we have learned to young people, to sharing it in ways that it makes sense to them, that they care about. And Monticello has led the way with that. The educational mission here is evident every day. It's so heartening to watch troops of these young kids walk up to the house. And you know they're making a memory that they will recall the rest of their life, what it was like to come to this place and see American history where it actually happened.

Young people teach us what we still need to discover.

So as we see, Dan Jordan created and led a scholarly enterprize of the greatest order with the highest ambitions and accomplishments. He did so by asking how Monticello could best serve the changing and expanding needs of the world beyond Monticello. He explained those needs to generous people in compelling ways. And so we have the still unfolding glories of present day Monticello, from the gentle and welcoming trail up the little mountain to all the glories that await us at the top.

But the spirit of Dan's accomplishment is perhaps most evident on every Fourth of July here on the mountaintop. Here, the naturalization ceremony shows that no matter where people happen to be born, here, they can become American by embracing the commitment to the great truth that all people are equal.

Thanks to the humane, brave, and scholarly leadership of Dan Jordan, Monticello embodies that truth every day.

Thank you very much.

Jane Kamensky: Thank you all very much for being here and continuing that journey of renewal at Monticello by coming back to the mountaintop. It's wonderful to greet so many former colleagues of Dan, his friends, his family, his wife Lou, Dan Jr., Katherine, Grace, and the grandchildren. One of whom is working here now, which is incredible.

I also wanted to offer thanks to people who have helped in the planning of this event, especially Ann Lucas, Ann Taylor, Paula Newcomb, and John and Renee Grisham. Thank you all so much for coming out tonight. Get off the mountain safely. And please do come back. That's the best way we can honor Dan.

All the best.