A discovery of Jefferson’s hand-written annotations in a copy of his Manual has led to new findings about Jefferson’s leadership on parliamentary law and a call for the modern Congress to update its rules.
In 1900, Coralie Franklin Cook was the only African-American woman who was asked to speak at Susan B. Anthony’s 80th birthday celebration. She had spent her life breaking barriers and fighting for the rights of women and women of color. Her disappointment in the movement to which she had devoted so...
Despite thousands of surviving documents — he wrote and received nearly 47,000 letters — Monticello’s curators have only recently fully understood Jefferson’s comprehensive system for drafting and organizing his correspondence.
Just as the first cases on COVID-19 were being reported in Virginia, Monticello's archaeologists were completing excavations on the East Lawn, in front on Jefferson's mansion. Our immediate goal was to make way of the first-ever electric lighting system for the area.
Perhaps now, more than ever, we are acutely aware of our built environment. With varied restrictions on travel, work settings, and even social gatherings, our immediate residential surroundings are in sharp focus. Spending more time at home in the age of COVID-19, gardens and porches have become...
According to Google maps it is 3,557 miles from my home in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Monticello. By contrast, my university office is 1.1 miles away from home. At the moment -- I write this during the UK-wide Covid-19 lockdown -- they are both equally inaccessible to me.
Two centuries ago, on February 13, 1819, James Tallmadge, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party formed by Thomas Jefferson, offered an amendment to a bill regarding the admission of the Territory of Missouri into the United States. The so-called Tallmadge Amendment proposed banning further...
On December 28, 1993, Monticello Getting Word historians Lucia "Cinder" Stanton, Dianne Swann-Wright, and Beverly Gray traveled to Chillicothe, Ohio to interview five members of the Pettiford family—three of whom were descendants of Madison Hemings. Since then, Getting Word staff have traveled more...
In January 2000 the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation (the predecessor of today’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation) issued a report concerning the allegation that Thomas Jefferson was the father of some or all of the children of Sally Hemings , an enslaved woman at Monticello. A special research...
A Statement by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation The issue of Jefferson’s paternity has been the subject of controversy for at least two centuries, ranging from contemporary newspaper articles in 1802 (when Jefferson was President) to scholarly debate well into the 1990s. It is now the Thomas...
