Join the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello for a virtual Fellow's Forum with Emily Bradley Greenfield, Ph.D. candidate in the History Department at Stanford University.

Since Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, Monticello has been visited as an American memorial. Here, the contours of a national origin story have been sketched and re-sketched, contested, and transmitted to a curious public. In 1923, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation formalized the site’s symbolic power, declaring its intent “to purchase, preserve, and maintain Monticello…as a national shrine.” 

But who decides the meaning of a shrine? What happens when we look beyond the script of the house tour, to include negotiations between the foundation’s New York City headquarters, its southern staff, and a steady stream of visitors? How does the story change when we center the Black laborers who shaped the public’s experience of the mountaintop, before and after 1923? And what does this one site have to say to us about a broader American impulse toward memorialization? Focused on the 1920s-1960s, this talk will explore how a project of national imagining at Monticello intersected with the memory of slavery and the racial politics of Jim Crow.