In Thomas Jefferson’s lifetime, the holidays at Monticello were a time for family gatherings, visiting friends, settling accounts and planning for the new year. For Monticello’s enslaved community, the holiday season was a time for reunion and a possible respite from labor on the Plantation.
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.
One of the most poignant of Jeffersonian artifacts is a 1782 scrap of paper with a quotation from the novel Tristram Shandy , written in Martha Wayles Jefferson’s hand but then taken up by her husband Thomas, as she was too weak to finish. Beginning with the phrase “time wastes too fast,” the...
In 1804 when Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr took to the "field of honor" to settle their differences, Burr killed Hamilton and simultaneously destroyed his political career forever. This duel was a tragic ‘end game’ to a fiercely contentious rivalry extending throughout their political lives, an...
Imagine a world where life moved at four miles an hour, and the most one could readily travel in a day was just thirty miles. Such was the slow world Thomas Jefferson was born into in 1743. Although transportation via Virginia’s waterways was common, especially in the Tidewater area, most people...
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “Whoever intends to live in a country must wish that country well, and has a natural right of assisting in the preservation of it.” While we often think of Jefferson’s efforts to “assist” the United States as being politically rooted, his work for the country often took...
Thomas Jefferson found an enemy in Alexander Hamilton, a frenemy in John Adams and his BFF in James Madison. Jefferson and Madison formed a political partnership and personal friendship that made them the dynamic duo of the Founding Fathers.
In 1805, a remarkable shipment was dispatched from a sizable Indian village near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota. A large hand-hewn boat headed down the Missouri River toward the President’s House in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles away, where Thomas Jefferson eagerly awaited word of the...
Visitors to Monticello and the University of Virginia (UVA) can easily see their connections to Thomas Jefferson, the visionary architect of both these U.N. World Heritage sites. The recent dedication of the Memorial to Enslaved Workers at UVA reveals Monticello’s enslaved community and the...
Jefferson was most likely not the first to introduce macaroni and cheese to America, nor did he invent the recipe. But he did write out a recipe for a 'macaroni' pasta dough, and he likely helped popularize the dish by serving what one guest to the President's House described as "a pie called...
