During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university.5% Back on All B&N PurchasesWith characteristic eloquence, Alan Taylor chronicles the unlikely emergence of one of the most important experiments in American education: the University of Virginia. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. Alan Taylor’s extraordinary new book illuminates the limits of republican reform in a society built on slavery. We tend to take Jefferson’s ideas out of the context of his own time, to read him as a prophet of a more democratic education in the future. It is a major contribution to our understanding of Thomas Jefferson’s career as an educational reformer and to the history of democratic self-government in Virginia.Millions of eBooks to Read InstantlyAn account of Jefferson's home state and university…A complex but fascinating story.In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. The book devotes much of the narrative to grounding the reader in the very different world of post-colonial America so that Jefferson’s vision can be differentiated from the competing visions of education in his day. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. In the coming years, Virginia actually hardened its commitment to slavery.
If we dismiss and demonize (or celebrate uncritically) leaders of the past, we gain a false sense of our own superior virtue and risk overlooking what we ought to be doing now—and the difficulties that we face.With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.Updating a life: The case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally HemingsFrom poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon. We have such an ingrained cultural reflex to divide people into “good guys” and “bad guys” that it becomes virtually impossible to come up with a more nuanced understanding of the past, filled with the interplay of light and dark in institutions and individuals.
Taylor’s rich, evocative book captures the surprising drama of that invention. By seeing his own inability to confront those inequalities directly, we can recognize the extent of our own challenges today.Sign up for our monthly e-newsletter and receive a coupon for 10% off your first LOA purchase. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Thomas Jefferson's involvement with and support of education is best known through his founding of the University of Virginia, which he established in 1819 as a secular institution after he left the presidency of the United States.Jefferson believed that libraries and books were so integral to individual and institutional education that he designed the university around its library. But that interpretation misses the limits that he confronted in a Virginia society committed to many forms of inequality: class, race, and gender. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.A book that refreshingly adds real substance to the abundant literature on Jefferson.By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. But, in the end, Jefferson’s granddaughters carried forward his faith in education by teaching a new generation–of women. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Thomas Jefferson: Papers and Biographies Collections, Hathi Trust Digital Library; Earliest known appearance in print: 20131. We could reach a deeper understanding of our origins if we stopped casting the leaders there as either heroes or villains, but instead placed them within the world that they lived in.A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.I also thought that exploring Jefferson’s attempts to reform education could speak to our own time of controversy over the structure, goals, and funding for public education, including higher education. From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education.
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