Books on American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson

Title: Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History

Author(s): Fawn McKay Brodie

ISBN 13: 9780393338331

Title: Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Eminent Lives Series)

In this unique biography of Thomas Jefferson, leading journalist and social critic Christopher Hitchens offers a startlingly new and provocative interpretation of our Founding Father—a man conflicted by power who wrote the Declaration of Independence and acted as ambassador to France yet yearned for a quieter career in the Virginia legislature. A masterly writer, Jefferson was an awkward public speaker. A professed proponent of emancipation, he elided the issue of slavery from the Declaration of Independence and continued to own human property. A reluctant candidate, he left an indelible presidential legacy. With intelligence, insight, eloquence, and wit, Hitchens gives us an artful portrait of a complex, formative figure and his turbulent era.

Author(s): Christopher Hitchens

ISBN 13: 9780060837068
Pages: 208

Title: Thomas Jefferson

Or so his disciples would have us believe. The real Thomas Jefferson was an ordinary man, with all the usual failings. Molded by the culture of the Virginia planter class, he fought against tyranny while oppressing his own slaves.

Author(s): Jonathan Sistine

ISBN 13: 9781523834488
Pages: 252

Title: Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy

In light of DNA evidence supporting a Jefferson-Hemings relationship, Gordon-Reed has added to her acclaimed study a new Preface in which she finds fresh reasons for seeing Thomas Jefferson as a complicated metaphor for the American character.

Possessing both a layperson's unfettered curiosity and a lawyer's logical mind, Gordon-Reed writes with an irresistible style and compassion about Thomas Jefferson's sexual involvement with his slave Sally Hemings. Her fascinating and convincing argument: not that the alleged 38-year liaison necessarily took place but rather that the evidence for its taking place has been denied a fair hearing.

Author(s): Annette Gordon-Reed

ISBN 13: 9780813918334
Pages: 288

Title: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

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.

Author(s): Jon Meacham

ISBN 13: 9780812979480
Pages: 759

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Title: Thomas Jefferson

Filled with archival photographs and amazing fact boxes, DK Biography is a groundbreaking series that introduces young readers to some of history's most interesting and influential characters.
From his childhood in Virginia to his two terms as President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson tells the story of the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

Author(s): Jacqueline Ching

ISBN 13: 9780756645069
Pages: 128

Title: Jefferson: A Life of Leadership

Thomas Jefferson is justly remembered as one of the great presidents of American history. Yet his greatest accomplishments--the Louisiana Purchase, the First Barbary War, the Lewis and Clark expedition--almost all came in his first term in office. His second term saw a sharp reversal of fortunes, as catastrophe engulfed the nation and Jefferson slunk out of office, never to play a role in public affairs again. While always giving a great man his due, this new biography explores the darker side of Jefferson's political legacy, examining how the flaws in both his personality and ideology led the nation to the brink of war and dissolution. It tells how Jefferson tossed aside legal norms in his pursuit of rival judges and his own vice president, and how his 1807 Embargo Act devastated the national economy, heightened section divisions, and made a subsequent war with Great Britain all but inevitable. Only when we understand the damage that Jefferson did to America, as well as his many achievements, can we begin to grapple with the complex legacy of our nation's most complex president. "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson

Author(s): Alexander Kennedy

ISBN 13: 9781535251792
Pages: 100

Title: The Jefferson Lies

"Thomas Jefferson stands falsely accused of several crimes, among them infidelity and disbelief. Noted historian David Barton now sets the record straight.

Author(s): David Barton

ISBN 13: 9781944229023
Pages: 416

Title: The Autobiography of Thomas Jefferson

In his riveting autobiography, Jefferson details many of the events that shaped his personal philosophy and would ultimately define his political career. Allowing the reader to step into the shoes of the author of the Declaration of Independence and third president of the United States, this book is a must for anyone interested in the life and ideals of one of America’s most influential Founding Fathers.

Author(s): Thomas Jefferson

ISBN 13: 9781619492639
Pages: 114

Title: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson designed his own tombstone, describing himself simply as "Author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia." It is in this simple epitaph that R.B. Bernstein finds the key to this enigmatic Founder--not as a great political figure, but as leader of "a revolution of ideas that would make the world over again."

In Thomas Jefferson, Bernstein offers the definitive short biography of this revered American--the first concise life in six decades. Bernstein deftly synthesizes the massive scholarship on his subject into a swift, insightful, evenhanded account. Here are all of Jefferson's triumphs, contradictions, and failings, from his luxurious (and debt-burdened) life as a Virginia gentleman to his passionate belief in democracy, from his tortured defense of slavery to his relationship with Sally Hemings. Jefferson was indeed multifaceted--an architect, inventor, writer, diplomat, propagandist, planter, party leader--and Bernstein explores all these roles even as he illuminates Jefferson's central place in the American enlightenment, that "revolution of ideas" that did so much to create the nation we know today. Together with the less well-remembered points in Jefferson's thinking--the nature of the Union, his vision of who was entitled to citizenship, his dread of debt (both personal and national)--they form the heart of this lively biography.

In this marvel of compression and comprehension, we see Jefferson more clearly than in the massive studies of earlier generations. More important, we see, in Jefferson's visionary ideas, the birth of the nation's grand sense of purpose.

Author(s): R. B. Bernstein

ISBN 13: 9780195181302
Pages: 288

Title: Thomas Jefferson

The edition of Shakespeare (and it is a handsome one) which Peter Jefferson used is still preserved among the heirlooms of his descendants

Author(s): Henry Merwin

ISBN 13: 9781479142446
Pages: 112

Title: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

<p class="null1">National Bestseller&nbsp;</p> <p>For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight—and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity—now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety—has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.</p> <p>For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing." In <b>American Sphinx,</b> Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams." For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large—a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles.</p> <p>From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath; that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a day at his writing desk; that sometimes his political sensibilities collided with his domestic agenda, as when he ordered an expensive piano from London during a boycott (and pledged to "keep it in storage"). We see him relishing such projects as the nailery at Monticello that allowed him to interact with his slaves more palatably, as pseudo-employer to pseudo-employees. We grow convinced that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than in the actual bedchamber. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We understand why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all—our very own sphinx.</p>

Author(s): Joseph J. Ellis

ISBN 13: 9780679764410
Pages: 440