The Libraries Leadership Legacy Of John Adams And Thomas Jefferson

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The Libraries, Leadership, & Legacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson

Author : Robert C. Baron
Publisher : Fulcrum Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9781936218080
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (18 download)

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Book Synopsis The Libraries, Leadership, & Legacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson by : Robert C. Baron

Download or read book The Libraries, Leadership, & Legacy of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson written by Robert C. Baron and published by Fulcrum Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a book about two special men and their time. But it is also about friendship, books and libraries, reading, understanding the wisdom of the past, and acting on this knowledge. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were among the great library builders of their age. They used the information in their books to guide them and, in their retirement, they articulated the role of books and ideas in their lives. Their lives were intertwined; they documented in letters and other writings what they felt, thought, and did. Except for the few years when they were political enemies, they were friends who shared ideas and engaged in one of the most distinguished correspondences in American history or letters. Introspective, reflective, and remarkably informed, these men tested each other's understanding of the previous half century of the nation's political, economic, and social development at the same time that they shared credit as founding fathers for much of what America had become. The year 2009 marked the bicentennial of Thomas Jefferson leaving the presidency and returning to Monticello-and also the start of the rebuilding of the friendship between Adams and Jefferson. Jefferson wrote to Adams in 1815, "I cannot live without books." And Adams wrote, "We ought not to die before we have explained ourselves to each other." And so they did in their correspondence as they reviewed the Revolution, the Constitution, and ideas on democracy from the Greeks to the Enlightenment. In June 2009, a weeklong conference called "John Adams and Thomas Jefferson: Libraries, Leadership, and Legacy" was held initially in Boston and then in Charlottesville. Thirty-two scholars presented papers on these two great Americans and the ideas they shared. Speakers came from twenty institutions in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The conference was sponsored by seven national organizations, including the Boston Public Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello. Book jacket.

The Hemingses of Monticello

Author : Annette Gordon-Reed
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0393337766
Total Pages : 800 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (933 download)

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Book Synopsis The Hemingses of Monticello by : Annette Gordon-Reed

Download or read book The Hemingses of Monticello written by Annette Gordon-Reed and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-08-25 with total page 800 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historian and legal scholar Gordon-Reed presents this epic work that tells the story of the Hemingses, an American slave family and their close blood ties to Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson's Legacy

Author : John Y. Cole
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780788138959
Total Pages : 103 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (389 download)

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Book Synopsis Jefferson's Legacy by : John Y. Cole

Download or read book Jefferson's Legacy written by John Y. Cole and published by . This book was released on 1997-03-01 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Library of Congress occupies a unique place in American civilization. Established a legislative library in 1800, it grew into a national institution in the 19th century. Since WW II, it has become an international resource of unparalleled dimensions. This documnet is a history of the Library of Congress, America's oldest national cultural institution, which will be 200 years old in the year 2000. Thomas Jefferson's personal library is the library's core. Discusses the collections, the buildings, and the Librarians of Congress. Reading list. Color photos.

The City-State of Boston

Author : Mark Peterson
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691209170
Total Pages : 764 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (912 download)

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Book Synopsis The City-State of Boston by : Mark Peterson

Download or read book The City-State of Boston written by Mark Peterson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 764 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the vaunted annals of America's founding, Boston has long been held up as an exemplary "city upon a hill" and the "cradle of liberty" for an independent United States. Wresting this iconic urban center from these misleading, tired clich s, The City-State of Boston highlights Boston's overlooked past as an autonomous city-state, and in doing so, offers a pathbreaking and brilliant new history of early America. Following Boston's development over three centuries, Mark Peterson discusses how this self-governing Atlantic trading center began as a refuge from Britain's Stuart monarchs and how--through its bargain with slavery and ratification of the Constitution - it would tragically lose integrity and autonomy as it became incorporated into the greater United States. Drawing from vast archives, and featuring unfamiliar alongside well-known figures, such as John Winthrop, Cotton Mather, and John Adams, Peterson explores Boston's origins in sixteenth-century utopian ideals, its founding and expansion into the hinterland of New England, and the growth of its distinctive political economy, with ties to the West Indies and southern Europe. By the 1700s, Boston was at full strength, with wide Atlantic trading circuits and cultural ties, both within and beyond Britain's empire. After the cataclysmic Revolutionary War, "Bostoners" aimed to negotiate a relationship with the American confederation, but through the next century, the new United States unraveled Boston's regional reign. The fateful decision to ratify the Constitution undercut its power, as Southern planters and slave owners dominated national politics and corroded the city-state's vision of a common good for all. Peeling away the layers of myth surrounding a revered city, The City-State of Boston offers a startlingly fresh understanding of America's history.

The Education of John Adams

Author : R. B. Bernstein
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0197502717
Total Pages : 256 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (975 download)

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Book Synopsis The Education of John Adams by : R. B. Bernstein

Download or read book The Education of John Adams written by R. B. Bernstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Education of John Adams is the first biography of John Adams by a biographer with legal training. It examines his origins in colonial Massachusetts, his education, and his struggle to choose a career and define a place for himself in colonial society. It explores the flowering of his legal career and the impact that law had on him and his understanding of himself; his growing involvement with the American Revolution as polemicist, as lawyer, as congressional delegate, and as diplomat; and his commitment to defining and expounding ideas about constitutionalism and how it should work as the body of ideas shaping the new United States. The book traces his part in launching the government of the United States under the U.S. Constitution; his service as the nation's first vice president and second president; and his retirement years, during which he was first a vexed and rejected ex-president and then became the revered Sage of Braintree. It describes the relationships that sustained him - with his wife, the brilliant and eloquent Abigail Adams; with his children; with such allies and supporters as Benjamin Rush and John Marshall; with such sometime friends and sometime adversaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson; and with such foes as Alexander Hamilton and Timothy Pickering. Bernstein establishes Adams as a key figure in the evolution of American constitutional theory and practice. This is the first biography to examine Adams's conflicted and hesitant ideas about slavery and race in the American context, raising serious questions about his mythic status as a friend of human equality and a foe of slavery. This book's foundation is the record left by Adams himself-- in diaries, letters, essays, pamphlets, and books. The Education of John Adams concludes by re-examining the often-debated question of the relevance of Adams's thought to our own time.

Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries

Author : Sean D. Moore
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0192573411
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries by : Sean D. Moore

Download or read book Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries written by Sean D. Moore and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early American libraries stood at the nexus of two transatlantic branches of commerce—the book trade and the slave trade. Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries bridges the study of these trades by demonstrating how Americans' profits from slavery were reinvested in imported British books and providing evidence that the colonial book market was shaped, in part, by the demand of slave owners for metropolitan cultural capital. Drawing on recent scholarship that shows how participation in London cultural life was very expensive in the eighteenth century, as well as evidence that enslavers were therefore some of the few early Americans who could afford to import British cultural products, the volume merges the fields of the history of the book, Atlantic studies, and the study of race, arguing that the empire-wide circulation of British books was underwritten by the labour of the African diaspora. The volume is the first in early American and eighteenth-century British studies to fuse our growing understanding of the material culture of the transatlantic text with our awareness of slavery as an economic and philanthropic basis for the production and consumption of knowledge. In studying the American dissemination of works of British literature and political thought, it claims that Americans were seeking out the forms of citizenship, constitutional traditions, and rights that were the signature of that British identity. Even though they were purchasing the sovereignty of Anglo-Americans at the expense of African-Americans through these books, however, some colonials were also making the case for the abolition of slavery.

The First Presidential Contest

Author : Jeffrey L. Pasley
Publisher : University Press of Kansas
ISBN 13 : 0700623515
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis The First Presidential Contest by : Jeffrey L. Pasley

Download or read book The First Presidential Contest written by Jeffrey L. Pasley and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 2016-12-04 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first study in half a century to focus on the election of 1796. At first glance, the first presidential contest looks unfamiliar—parties were frowned upon, there was no national vote, and the candidates did not even participate (the political mores of the day forbade it). Yet for all that, Jeffrey L. Pasley contends, the election of 1796 was “absolutely seminal,” setting the stage for all of American politics to follow. Challenging much of the conventional understanding of this election, Pasley argues that Federalist and Democratic-Republican were deeply meaningful categories for politicians and citizens of the 1790s, even if the names could be inconsistent and the institutional presence lacking. He treats the 1796 election as a rough draft of the democratic presidential campaigns that came later rather than as the personal squabble depicted by other historians. It set the geographic pattern of New England competing with the South at the two extremes of American politics, and it established the basic ideological dynamic of a liberal, rights-spreading American left arrayed against a conservative, society-protecting right, each with its own competing model of leadership. Rather than the inner thoughts and personal lives of the Founders, covered in so many other volumes, Pasley focuses on images of Adams and Jefferson created by supporters-and detractors-through the press, capturing the way that ordinary citizens in 1796 would have actually experienced candidates they never heard speak. Newspaper editors, minor officials, now forgotten congressman, and individual elector candidates all take a leading role in the story to show how politics of the day actually worked. Pasley's cogent study rescues the election of 1796 from the shadow of 1800 and invites us to rethink how we view that campaign and the origins of American politics.

Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations

Author : Christoph Schmitt-Maaß
Publisher : Rodopi
ISBN 13 : 9401210640
Total Pages : 386 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (12 download)

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Book Synopsis Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations by : Christoph Schmitt-Maaß

Download or read book Fénelon in the Enlightenment: Traditions, Adaptations, and Variations written by Christoph Schmitt-Maaß and published by Rodopi. This book was released on 2014-10-25 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: François Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai (1651–1715) exerted a considerable influence on the development and spread of the Enlightenment. His most famous work, the Homeric novel Les Aventures de Télémaque, Fils d’Ulysse (1699), composed for the education of his pupil Duc de Bourgogne, was, after the Bible, the most widely read literary work in France throughout the eighteenth century. It was also translated and adapted into many other European languages. And yet oddly enough, the question as to why Fénelon’s ideas resonated over such a wide span of space and time has as yet found no coherent and comprehensive answer. By taking Fénelon’s intellectual influence as a matter of ‘cultural translation’, this anthology traces the reception of Fénelon and his multifaceted writings outside of France, and in doing so aims to enrich not only our understanding of the Enlightenment, but also of the thinker himself.

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

Author : Jon Meacham
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 0812979486
Total Pages : 802 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (129 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by : Jon Meacham

Download or read book Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power written by Jon Meacham and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2013-10-29 with total page 802 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Entertainment Weekly • The Seattle Times • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Bloomberg Businessweek In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era. Philosophers think; politicians maneuver. Jefferson’s genius was that he was both and could do both, often simultaneously. Such is the art of power. Thomas Jefferson hated confrontation, and yet his understanding of power and of human nature enabled him to move men and to marshal ideas, to learn from his mistakes, and to prevail. Passionate about many things—women, his family, books, science, architecture, gardens, friends, Monticello, and Paris—Jefferson loved America most, and he strove over and over again, despite fierce opposition, to realize his vision: the creation, survival, and success of popular government in America. Jon Meacham lets us see Jefferson’s world as Jefferson himself saw it, and to appreciate how Jefferson found the means to endure and win in the face of rife partisan division, economic uncertainty, and external threat. Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American history. The father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, and of the settling of the West, Jefferson recognized that the genius of humanity—and the genius of the new nation—lay in the possibility of progress, of discovering the undiscovered and seeking the unknown. From the writing of the Declaration of Independence to elegant dinners in Paris and in the President’s House; from political maneuverings in the boardinghouses and legislative halls of Philadelphia and New York to the infant capital on the Potomac; from his complicated life at Monticello, his breathtaking house and plantation in Virginia, to the creation of the University of Virginia, Jefferson was central to the age. Here too is the personal Jefferson, a man of appetite, sensuality, and passion. The Jefferson story resonates today not least because he led his nation through ferocious partisanship and cultural warfare amid economic change and external threats, and also because he embodies an eternal drama, the struggle of the leadership of a nation to achieve greatness in a difficult and confounding world. Praise for Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power “This is probably the best single-volume biography of Jefferson ever written.”—Gordon S. Wood “A big, grand, absorbing exploration of not just Jefferson and his role in history but also Jefferson the man, humanized as never before.”—Entertainment Weekly “[Meacham] captures who Jefferson was, not just as a statesman but as a man. . . . By the end of the book . . . the reader is likely to feel as if he is losing a dear friend. . . . [An] absorbing tale.”—The Christian Science Monitor “This terrific book allows us to see the political genius of Thomas Jefferson better than we have ever seen it before. In these endlessly fascinating pages, Jefferson emerges with such vitality that it seems as if he might still be alive today.”—Doris Kearns Goodwin

Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood

Author : Brian Steele
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139536672
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (395 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood by : Brian Steele

Download or read book Thomas Jefferson and American Nationhood written by Brian Steele and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-30 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book emphasises the centrality of nationhood to Thomas Jefferson's thought and politics, envisioning Jefferson as a cultural nationalist whose political project sought the alignment of the American state system with the will and character of the nation. Jefferson believed that America was the one nation on earth able to realise in practice universal ideals to which other peoples could only aspire. He appears in the book as the essential narrator of what he once called the 'American Story': as the historian, the sociologist and the ethnographer; the political theorist of the nation; the most successful practitioner of its politics; and its most enthusiastic champion. The book argues that reorienting Jefferson around the concept of American nationhood recovers an otherwise easily missed coherence to his political career and helps make sense of a number of conundrums in his thought and practice.

The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind

Author : Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813946492
Total Pages : 503 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind by : Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy

Download or read book The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind written by Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 503 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Already renowned as a statesman, Thomas Jefferson in his retirement from government turned his attention to the founding of an institution of higher learning. Never merely a patron, the former president oversaw every aspect of the creation of what would become the University of Virginia. Along with the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, he regarded it as one of the three greatest achievements in his life. Nonetheless, historians often treat this period as an epilogue to Jefferson’s career. In The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind, Andrew O’Shaughnessy offers a twin biography of Jefferson in retirement and of the University of Virginia in its earliest years. He reveals how Jefferson’s vision anticipated the modern university and profoundly influenced the development of American higher education. The University of Virginia was the most visible apex of what was a much broader educational vision that distinguishes Jefferson as one of the earliest advocates of a public education system. Just as Jefferson’s proclamation that "all men are created equal" was tainted by the ongoing institution of slavery, however, so was his university. O’Shaughnessy addresses this tragic conflict in Jefferson’s conception of the university and society, showing how Jefferson’s loftier aspirations for the university were not fully realized. Nevertheless, his remarkable vision in founding the university remains vital to any consideration of the role of education in the success of the democratic experiment.

John Adams's Republic

Author : Richard Alan Ryerson
Publisher : JHU Press
ISBN 13 : 142141922X
Total Pages : 571 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (214 download)

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Book Synopsis John Adams's Republic by : Richard Alan Ryerson

Download or read book John Adams's Republic written by Richard Alan Ryerson and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2016-09-15 with total page 571 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: VIII. Redefining the Republican Tradition, 1784-1787 -- IX. John Adams's Republic in Republican America, 1787-1800 -- X.A Retrospective Retirement, 1801-1826 -- Conclusion: Memory and Desire in America's Republican Revolution -- Notes -- An Essay on Sources -- A Chronology of John Adams's Political Study and Writings -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- X -- Z

Jefferson's Shadow

Author : Keith Thomson
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300184034
Total Pages : 337 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Jefferson's Shadow by : Keith Thomson

Download or read book Jefferson's Shadow written by Keith Thomson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-27 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An assessment of the third President's lesser-known passion for science explores his achievements as a consummate intellectual whose scientific views were central to his public and private life, offering insight into how Jefferson's scientific principles shaped his political and religious decisions while revealing his role in launching four major sciences in America.

A Companion to Thomas Jefferson

Author : Francis D. Cogliano
Publisher : John Wiley & Sons
ISBN 13 : 1444344617
Total Pages : 899 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (443 download)

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Book Synopsis A Companion to Thomas Jefferson by : Francis D. Cogliano

Download or read book A Companion to Thomas Jefferson written by Francis D. Cogliano and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-09-15 with total page 899 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Thomas Jefferson presents a state-of-the-art assessment and overview of the life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson through a collection of essays grounded in the latest scholarship. Features essays by the leading scholars in the field, including Pulitzer Prize winners Annette Gordon-Reed and Jack Rakove Includes a section that considers Jefferson’s legacy Explores Jefferson’s wide range of interests and expertise, and covers his public career, private life, his views on democracy, and his writings Written to be accessible for the non-specialist as well as Jefferson scholars

Recognizing Wrongs

Author : John C. P. Goldberg
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674246527
Total Pages : 393 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (742 download)

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Book Synopsis Recognizing Wrongs by : John C. P. Goldberg

Download or read book Recognizing Wrongs written by John C. P. Goldberg and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two preeminent legal scholars explain what tort law is all about and why it matters, and describe their own view of tort’s philosophical basis: civil recourse theory. Tort law is badly misunderstood. In the popular imagination, it is “Robin Hood” law. Law professors, meanwhile, mostly dismiss it as an archaic, inefficient way to compensate victims and incentivize safety precautions. In Recognizing Wrongs, John Goldberg and Benjamin Zipursky explain the distinctive and important role that tort law plays in our legal system: it defines injurious wrongs and provides victims with the power to respond to those wrongs civilly. Tort law rests on a basic and powerful ideal: a person who has been mistreated by another in a manner that the law forbids is entitled to an avenue of civil recourse against the wrongdoer. Through tort law, government fulfills its political obligation to provide this law of wrongs and redress. In Recognizing Wrongs, Goldberg and Zipursky systematically explain how their “civil recourse” conception makes sense of tort doctrine and captures the ways in which the law of torts contributes to the maintenance of a just polity. Recognizing Wrongs aims to unseat both the leading philosophical theory of tort law—corrective justice theory—and the approaches favored by the law-and-economics movement. It also sheds new light on central figures of American jurisprudence, including former Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Benjamin Cardozo. In the process, it addresses hotly contested contemporary issues in the law of damages, defamation, malpractice, mass torts, and products liability.

Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History

Author : Hannah Spahn
Publisher : University of Virginia Press
ISBN 13 : 0813931681
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (139 download)

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Book Synopsis Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History by : Hannah Spahn

Download or read book Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History written by Hannah Spahn and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the famous opening to the Declaration of Independence ("When in the course of human events..."), almost all of Thomas Jefferson's writings include creative, stylistically and philosophically complex references to time and history. Although best known for his "forward-looking" statements envisioning future progress, Jefferson was in fact deeply concerned with the problem of coming to terms with the impending loss or fragmentation of the past. As Hannah Spahn shows in Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History, his efforts to promote an exceptionalist interpretation of the United States as the first nation to escape from the "crimes and calamities" of European history were complicated both by his doubts about the outcome of the American experiment and by his skepticism about the methods and morals of eighteenth-century philosophical history. Spahn approaches the conundrum of Jefferson's Janus-faced, equally forward- and backward-oriented thought by discussing it less as a matter of personal contradiction and paradox than as the expression of a late Newtonian Enlightenment, in a period between ancient and modern modes of explaining change in time. She follows Jefferson in his creation of an influential narrative of American and global history over the course of half a century, opening avenues into a temporal and historical imagination that was different from ours, and offering new assessments of the solutions Jefferson and his generation found (or failed to find) to central moral and political problems like slavery.

The Problem of Democracy

Author : Nancy Isenberg
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0525557520
Total Pages : 578 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (255 download)

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Book Synopsis The Problem of Democracy by : Nancy Isenberg

Download or read book The Problem of Democracy written by Nancy Isenberg and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Told with authority and style. . . Crisply summarizing the Adamses' legacy, the authors stress principle over partisanship."--The Wall Street Journal How the father and son presidents foresaw the rise of the cult of personality and fought those who sought to abuse the weaknesses inherent in our democracy. Until now, no one has properly dissected the intertwined lives of the second and sixth (father and son) presidents. John and John Quincy Adams were brilliant, prickly politicians and arguably the most independently minded among leaders of the founding generation. Distrustful of blind allegiance to a political party, they brought a healthy skepticism of a brand-new system of government to the country's first 50 years. They were unpopular for their fears of the potential for demagoguery lurking in democracy, and--in a twist that predicted the turn of twenty-first century politics--they warned against, but were unable to stop, the seductive appeal of political celebrities Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. In a bold recasting of the Adamses' historical roles, The Problem of Democracy is a major critique of the ways in which their prophetic warnings have been systematically ignored over the centuries. It's also an intimate family drama that brings out the torment and personal hurt caused by the gritty conduct of early American politics. Burstein and Isenberg make sense of the presidents' somewhat iconoclastic, highly creative engagement with America's political and social realities. By taking the temperature of American democracy, from its heated origins through multiple upheavals, the authors reveal the dangers and weaknesses that have been present since the beginning. They provide a clear-eyed look at a decoy democracy that masks the reality of elite rule while remaining open, since the days of George Washington, to a very undemocratic result in the formation of a cult surrounding the person of an elected leader.