HUMA/HIST 555 – The Life and Letters of Thomas Jefferson

Who was Thomas Jefferson? This seminar will not answer that question fully, but we plan to explore Jefferson’s thought and character through his letters and other writings—in the words he left behind. Many people over the age of 40, unencumbered by the manufactured New Ignorance, know him chiefly as the author of the Declaration of Independence, the ultimate American idealist. But he was also a pragmatic statesman who navigated choppy political waters as the first secretary of state and later as the third president of the United States. Jefferson is a figure belonging almost as much to mythology as to history, though he suffered crippling personal loss in his lifetime, making him all too human. Even more, the man who proclaimed to the world that “all men are created equal”  was a man who lived a life conspicuously unequal to the lives of others; he is for many a hero and, also for many now, a villain. Still, he bore the marks of greatness. The assumption guiding this seminar will be that such people do not materialize spontaneously; they are formed by their reading and writing as well as by the companions they choose and the worldly experiences they both enjoy and endure, all going to make up the sum of their lives and characters. Here we will discuss the sources of Jefferson’s ideas and sentiments, from the books he read to the documents and letters he wrote, tapping into the groundwater of his thinking.