'Do you know," Thomas Jefferson wrote tantalizingly to John Adams in the summer of 1815, “that there exists in manuscript the ablest work of this kind ever yet executed, of the debates of the constitutional convention of Philadelphia?” Unfortunately for him, Adams never had occasion to read these…
Few if any Americans are associated with more apocryphal quotes than Thomas Jefferson, but the false notion that he said, “dissent is the highest form of patriotism” is among the easiest to dispel. Because Jefferson never would have said something so idiotic. Of course dissent can be patriotic, but…
To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…
To many of those commenting on Donald Trump’s maiden address to the United Nations, especially if otherwise disturbed by the president’s character, his emphasis on state sovereignty was a welcome dose of diplomatic normalcy. For example, David Ignatius of the Washington Post found this theme…
The statue wars continue: Last week protesters at the University of Virginia draped a tarp over a bronze of Thomas Jefferson, declaring the monument “an emblem of white supremacy” and demanding that the students of Jefferson’s university be subjected to racial reeducation.
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson had already heard the name Benjamin Banneker by the time the Maryland-born free black wrote to him on August 19, 1791. Banneker, a farmer and self-taught man of scientific pursuits, lived near the Quaker Ellicott brothers in what is now Ellicott City, just north…
President Trump’s statement on Charlottesville caught my attention roughly halfway through: “We are a nation founded on the truth that all of us are created equal,” he said. Trump was invoking the Declaration of Independence, which indeed set forth that truth, and on which we were founded as a…
In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other…
In a recent article for Townhall, columnist Kurt Schlichter wrote that the putative Senate candidacy in Michigan of “Kid Rock” (stage name of rocker/rapper Robert Ritchie) “should make every normal American smile” because “it will drive the liberals insane” and “make George Will [and other…
Most Americans have thought about Thomas Jefferson much as our first professional biographer, James Parton, did. "If Jefferson was wrong," wrote Parton in 1874, "America is wrong. If America is right, Jefferson was right." Unfortunately, Jefferson at present looks to be more wrong than right, at…
How are we to approach the man? No one has ever gotten him quite right. Benjamin Franklin thought him, in a famous remark, “sometimes, and in some things, absolutely out of his senses." Thomas Jefferson could never fully figure out what to make of such a witty, learned, emotionally open man. In our…
I began teaching at the University of Virginia at the height of the turmoil over the Vietnam War. Dissent was everywhere: There were marches on Washington and on campus. But there was always something different about the angry UVA students. For instance, upon returning from one march on Washington,…
According to legend, John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence with a signature so large that the King of England could see it without his spectacles. That bit of bravado has long been a staple of American history classes. I must have heard it several times growing up, and even in…
With South Carolina removing the Confederate flag from its capitol grounds, state and local Democratic parties seem to have developed an urge to purge. Salena Zito of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports on an effort to get rid of the party’s founders:
Hillary Clinton is scheduled to speak at the Virginia Democratic party's Jefferson-Jackson Dinner on Friday in northern Virgnia. The event is from 2-6 p.m. in Fairfax.
President Obama and French President François Hollande will visit Monticello tomorrow afternoon, according to the official White House schedule. It's in the spirit of "the shared values we hold dear: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," says the White House.
The importance of this book stretches beyond the subject it addresses.
Bill Kristol, writing four years ago for the New York Times:
From a talk TWS contributor Geoffrey Norman gave a couple years ago, in which he explained Thomas Jefferson, the Southerner, to a room full of Vermonters:
The world came unhinged in the fall of 2008.
God of Liberty
The Deadlocked Election of 1800 Jefferson, Burr, and the Union in the Balance by James Roger Sharp Kansas, 239 pp., $34.95