Thomas Jefferson

<p><span class="deck">He was a capitalist. He was an urban reformer. He was a country boy. He was “Comrade Jesus,” a hardworking socialist. He was the world’s first ad man. For a century and a half, novelists have been trying to recapture the “real” Jesus.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">When the French Revolution broke out 200 years ago this month, Americans greeted it enthusiastically. After all, without the French, <span class="typestyle">we</span> could never have become free. But the cheers faded as the brutality of the convulsion emerged, and Americans realized that they were still only a feeble newborn facing a giant, intimidating world power. </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A year ago, we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted that this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the republic.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Since the birth of the nation, the public’s perception of the quality of public schools has swung from approval to dismay and back again. Here, an eminent historian traces the course of school reform and finds that neither conservative nor liberal movements ever fully achieve their aims, which may be just as well.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">200 years ago, the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then, Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a health,y young economic giant. How did he do it?</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">When Jefferson wanted a job done right, he did it himself.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">At the dawn of this century, a new form of residential architecture rose from the American heartland, ruled by the total integration of space, site, and structure.</span></p>

<p>It has always been politics as usual.</p>

<p><span class="deck">The Russians claim they want to be more like us, but do they have any idea who we are?</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The two-party system, undreamt of by the founders of the republic, has been one of its basic shaping forces ever since their time.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">For years, people have argued that France had the <span class="typestyle"> real</span> revolution and that ours was mild by comparison. But now, a powerful new book argues that the American Revolution was the most sweeping in all history. It alone established a pure commercial culture that makes America the universal society we are today. </span></p>

<p><span class="deck">THIS SPRING, THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF JEFFERSON’S BIRTH, RESTORATION BEGINS ON POPLAR FOREST, WHICH HE ONCE CALLED “THE BEST DWELLING HOUSE IN THE STATE, EXCEPT THAT OF MONTICELLO.” WHILE THE WORK PROGESSES, THE HOUSE IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, AND ITS GHOSTLY EMPTINESS HEIGHTENS THE SENSE OF ITS ORIGINAL OCCUPANT.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stood together in America’s perilous dawn, but politics soon drove them apart. Then, in their last years, the two old enemies began a remarkable correspondence that is both testimony to the power of friendship and an eloquent summary of the dialogue that went on within the Revolutionary generation and that continues within our own.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Once seen as a vice and now as a public panacea, the national passion that got Thomas Jefferson in trouble has been expanding for two centuries.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">No Chief Executive has ever made it out of the White House without being scalded.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The ambassador from an infant republic spent five enchanted years in the French capital at a time when monarchy was giving way to revolution. Walking the city streets today, you can still feel the extravagant spirit of the city and the era he knew.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Three movies newly available on video cast a cold and, occasionally, even scornful eye on their subjects.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><lead_in>DURING THIS TRIP, HE GAVE THE NEW</lead_in> nation a new industry, wrote a proto-guide to New England inns and taverns, (probably) did some secret politicking, discovered a town that lived up to his hopes for a democratic society, scrutinized everything from rattlesnakes to rum manufacture, and, in the process, pretty much invented the summer vacation itself.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The<em> Declaration of Independence</em> is not what Thomas Jefferson thought it was when he wrote it, and that's why we celebrate it.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">…and grow, and grow, from almost no employees to three million. Don’t blame the welfare state, or the military; the truth is much more interesting.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Why the possible liaison between Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings matters to us.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"><lead_in> After three times</lead_in> traveling the trail they blazed, the author imagines what the two captains of Jefferson’s Corps of Discovery would make of the civilization we have built on the tremendous promise they offered.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A Jefferson descendant's thoughts on luck, ancestry, and the meaning of the DNA findings</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">David McCullough explains why he thinks that history is the most challenging, exhilarating, and immediate of subjects.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">VOTER TURNOUT MAY BE DOWN IN RECENT YEARS, BUT THE INVOLVEMENT OF THE COMMON CITIZEN HAS GROWN TO FAR SURPASS ANYTHING THE FOUNDING FATHERS EVER DREAMED OF.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">When John Adams was elected president, and Thomas Jefferson as vice president, each came to see the other as a traitor. Out of their enmity grew our modern political system.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">A descendant of Thomas Jefferson comments on the quarrel over who can be allowed in the family graveyard, and the missing remains of Sally Hemings. The outcome of the dispute is important to every American.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">“WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS…”</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">The explorers who set out 200 years ago were in danger for three years. Their legacy was in danger for decade after decade, and it was Meriwether Lewis who almost killed it.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Why have our presidents almost always stumbled after the first four years?</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Suppose they could go on "Meet The Press"...</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Sharp business skills ensured the first president’s phenomenal success.</span></p>

<p>To call it loaded question does not begin to do justice to the matter, given America’s tortured racial history and its haunting legacy.</p>

<p><span class="deck">Over the question of whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union as a free or slave state in 1820, creative moderates brokered an ingenious compromise that averted civil war.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck">Without major compromises by all involved, and the agreement to avoid the contentious issue of slavery, the framers would never have written and ratified the Constitution.</span></p>

<p><span class="deck"> As Adams and Jefferson died, America came of age</span> </p>

<p>An impetuous and sometimes corrupt Congress has often hamstrung the efforts of the president since the earliest days of the republic.</p>

<p>Thomas Jefferson took his scissors to the Bible in search of a higher truth.</p>

<p>The 1807 prosecution of Aaron Burr for treason was a highly flawed and failed endeavor.</p>

<p>It has been called one of the most consequential debates in American history. The Revolution's greatest orator later fought to stop ratification of the Constitution because of his worries about the powers proposed for the federal government.</p>

<p>Jefferson transformed an elegant country house into an American symbol, a paradigm for the young nation’s architecture.</p>

<p>Incensed that many leading European scientists had belittled North America's climate and fauna, Thomas Jefferson shipped them evidence and published a long reply in <em>Notes on the State of Virginia.</em></p>

<p>Jefferson had children with his wife, Martha, and then with his and slave, Sally Hemings, and these children lived very different lives as a result of their race.</p>

<p>Congress debated a resolution to impeach Jefferson because of an appointment that Federalists thought suspicious — an early precedent that clarified Congressional roles in oversight.</p>

<p>Thomas Jefferson’s <em>Declaration of Independence</em> announced a new epoch in world history, transforming a provincial tax revolt into a great struggle to liberate humanity from the tyrannies of the past.</p>