This year Monticello launched the new ‘Getting Word’ website —a vast collection of oral histories, images, and documentation encompassing seven generations of families descended from Monticello’s African American community. The website is the result of decades of research, nearly twenty years of...
The New York Times calls it "an invaluable companion book" to the recently opened exhibition Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty. This pioneering work by Monticello's Shannon Senior Research Historian Cinder Stanton has deepened our understanding of Jefferson—his character and...
Monticello's joint exhibition with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opens Jan 27., at the National Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Admission is free, and we hope you'll get a chance to experience it before it closes on Oct...
The AP's Zinie Chen Sampson writes about three new projects launching this winter to shed light on the slaves who lived and worked at Monticello. The article has appeared in several U.S. media outlets as well as in the UK and India. Read it online (no longer available).
A recent entry in the New York Times' ongoing Disunion feature revisiting the Civil War, highlights an interview with Fountain Hughes, whose ancestors were slaves at Monticello, and cites the work of our own Cinder Stanton. Hughes's interview, originally recorded as part of the Slave Narrative...
“What is the coolest thing you’ve ever found?” This is a question I get often yet it is one of the most difficult to answer. Everything that we find provides valuable information for our research of how people lived in the past, so what we think is “cool” may not be what others would say is “cool...
Everyone knows that archaeologists dig. But it is less widely appreciated that just how they dig and what they find varies with the kinds of questions they ask and the assumptions they make. Two excavation campaigns were conducted on Mulberry Row -- the first in 1957 and the second in the early...
In a time when there was no thought of providing former chief executives with pensions, Thomas Jefferson relied primarily on the produce of his farms for subsistence and money. His main cash crops were wheat and tobacco. The third president generally prided himself on the quality of the staples...
In January 2012 the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), in partnership with the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, opened the exhibition Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty . The exhibition is on view in the NMAAHC gallery at the...
In 2009, members of the Monticello Archaeology staff teamed up with zoological archaeologist Joanne Bowen from Colonial Williamsburg to present a collaborative academic poster at the Society for American Archaeology annual conference. The following is a summary of that research.
