Thomas Jefferson sold his extensive collection of books to the nation in 1815 to replace the congressional library destroyed when the British burned the United States Capitol the previous year. Famously declaring that “I cannot live without books,” he quickly began ordering replacements of titles...
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...
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...
' 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. ','','full_html'),('node','blog_post','0','8168','9304','und','0','...
Monticello Associate Curator Diane Ehrenpreis takes us through Jefferson's interest in innovation and technology and the story behind his revolving desk.
