Internet Resources
- Brief Biography of Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson wrote his own epitaph and designed the obelisk grave marker that was to bear three of his accomplishments and “not a word more."
- Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826): The American RevolutionFew members of the founding generation rank with Thomas Jefferson in the defining of the American Revolution for contemporaries and the shaping its legacy for posterity.
- Thomas Jefferson: American Battlefield TrustInformation on Thomas Jefferson from the American Battlefield Trust.
- Thomas Jefferson: HistoryThomas Jefferson (1743-1826), author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, was a leading figure in America’s early development.
- Thomas Jefferson’s Fist & America’s IndependenceToday Americans celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. What sometimes seems a fait accompli in retrospect was anything but at the time. Independence did not have to happen. In the years leading up to July 4, 1776, Thomas Jefferson and his cohorts gave England every opportunity to address colonist concerns satisfactorily.
Streaming Media
- Ken Burns: Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson is a two-part portrait of one of the most fascinating and complicated figures ever to walk across America’s public stage – our enigmatic and brilliant third president. Thomas Jefferson embodies within his own life the most profound contradictions of American history: as the author of our most sacred document, the Declaration of Independence, he gave voice to our fervent desire for freedom, but he also owned more than 150 human beings and never saw fit to free them.
- Thomas Jefferson & His Democracy: Crash Course US HistoryIn which John Green teaches you about founding father and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson is a somewhat controversial figure in American history, largely because he, like pretty much all humans, was a big bundle of contradictions. Jefferson was a slave-owner who couldn't decide if he liked slavery. He advocated for small government, but expanded federal power more than either of his presidential predecessor. He also idealized the independent farmer and demonized manufacturing, but put policies in place that would expand industrial production in the US. Controversy may ensue as we try to deviate a bit from the standard hagiography/slander story that usually told about old TJ. John explores Jefferson's election, his policies, and some of the new nation's (literally and figuratively) formative events that took place during Jefferson's presidency. In addition to all this, Napoleon drops in to sell Louisiana, John Marshall sets the course of the Supreme Court, and John Adams gets called a tiny tyrant.
Perspectives
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.
Jefferson's Demons
"I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended." -- Thomas Jefferson Thomas Jefferson suffered during his life from periodic bouts of dejection and despair, shadowed intervals during which he was full of "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead. Not long before he composed the Declaration of Independence, the young Jefferson lay for six weeks in idleness and ill health at Monticello, paralyzed by a mysterious "malady." Similar lapses were to recur during anxious periods in his life, often accompanied by violent headaches. In Jefferson's Demons, Michael Knox Beran illuminates an optimistic man's darker side -- Jefferson as we have rarely seen him before. The worst of these moments came after his wife died in 1782.
Jefferson's America
Jefferson's America sheds new light on one of the key aspects of Jefferson's presidency. Almost everyone who has taken a U.S. history course is familiar with Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase and the travels of Lewis and Clark, but that's not where this formative episode in American history begins or ends. In fact, Jefferson sent four other expeditions West--Zebulon Pike was dispatched on two missions- first, to the headwaters of the Mississippi, and second, toward what is now Colorado. William Dunbar and Dr. George Hunter explored northern Louisiana and Arkansas. Peter Custis and Thomas Freeman (with military officer Richard Sparks) followed the Red River of North Texas and Oklahoma. The stakes for American expansion were enormously high--at a time when Britain, France, and Spain were also all vying for control of the vast expanse of land west of the Mississippi River, the geopolitics of discovery were paramount. Jefferson, a true student of the Enlightenment, sought out men of science to undertake these urgent missions into the frontier. But they weren't always well-matched--with each other, or even with the task of exploring itself. Tensions between Dunbar and Hunter in particular threatened to undermine Jefferson's progress, leaving the United States in danger of losing its foothold in the West. Jefferson's America will rediscover the robust and often harrowing action from those seminal expeditions and use them as a means of understanding the Jeffersonian era and the president's vision for a continental America.