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Thomas Jefferson
…and grow, and grow, from almost no employees to three million. Don’t blame the welfare state, or the military; the truth is much more interesting.
The Declaration of Independence is not what Thomas Jefferson thought it was when he wrote it, and that's why we celebrate it.
DURING THIS TRIP, HE GAVE THE NEW nation a new industry, wrote a proto-guide to New England inns and taverns, (probably) did some secret politicking, discovered a town that lived up to his hopes for a democratic society, scrutinized everything from rattlesnakes to rum manufacture, and, in the process, pretty much invented the summer vacation itself.
BY THE END OF THE FIRST CONGRESS, IN THE SPRING OF 1791, Thomas Jefferson badly needed a vacation. The first Secretary of State disliked the noise, dirt, and crowds of the capital, Philadelphia, and the cramped routines of office work.
Three movies newly available on video cast a cold and, occasionally, even scornful eye on their subjects.
When Sunrise at Campobello, Dore Schary’s play about the crippling of Franklin D. Roosevelt, opened on Broadway, Eleanor Roosevelt and two close friends were in the audience as his guests. It is a heroic double portrait in which Mrs.
The ambassador from an infant republic spent five enchanted years in the French capital at a time when monarchy was giving way to revolution. Walking the city streets today, you can still feel the extravagant spirit of the city and the era he knew.
Paris is every day enlarging and beautifying,” Thomas Jefferson noted with satisfaction during his residence there as minister to France. The city under construction was a delight to Jefferson, the art patron and amateur architect.
No Chief Executive has ever made it out of the White House without being scalded.
Remember Admiral Bobby Ray Inman? He was the Clinton Secretary of Defense-designate with a short fuse and an even shorter career as a nominee.
Once seen as a vice and now as a public panacea, the national passion that got Thomas Jefferson in trouble has been expanding for two centuries.
“I’m dad-gum disgusted at trying to police every half-square and every half-house,” Senator Huey Long told a radio audience in Louisiana in May 1935. “You can’t close gambling nowhere where the people want to gamble.”
John Adams and Thomas Jefferson stood together in America’s perilous dawn, but politics soon drove them apart. Then, in their last years, the two old enemies began a remarkable correspondence that is both testimony to the power of friendship and an eloquent summary of the dialogue that went on within the Revolutionary generation and that continues within our own.
THIS SPRING, THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF JEFFERSON’S BIRTH, RESTORATION BEGINS ON POPLAR FOREST, WHICH HE ONCE CALLED “THE BEST DWELLING HOUSE IN THE STATE, EXCEPT THAT OF MONTICELLO.” WHILE THE WORK PROGESSES, THE HOUSE IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, AND ITS GHOSTLY EMPTINESS HEIGHTENS THE SENSE OF ITS ORIGINAL OCCUPANT.
Only rarely did Thomas Jefferson speak directly of his second home, Poplar Forest, referring rather to “my property in Bedford” or employing some other casual euphemism.
For years, people have argued that France had the real revolution and that ours was mild by comparison. But now, a powerful new book argues that the American Revolution was the most sweeping in all history. It alone established a pure commercial culture that makes America the universal society we are today.
The French Revolution followed American independence by six years, but it was the later event that went into the books as “the Great Revolution” and became the revolutionary archetype.
They’ve all had things to say about their fellow chief executives. Once in a great while, one was even flattering.
John Adams said that Thomas Jefferson’s mind was “eaten to a honeycomb with ambition, yet weak, confused, uninformed, and ignorant.” Ulysses S.
The two-party system, undreamt of by the founders of the republic, has been one of its basic shaping forces ever since their time.
The Russians claim they want to be more like us, but do they have any idea who we are?
The Russian road to democracy is not going to be easy. In the 45-volume edition of Vladimir Lenin’s collected works, the index shows no entry for Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, John Adams, or James Madison.
It has always been politics as usual.
Supreme Court vacancies have provoked fierce, colorful, and wholly partisan battles since the earliest years of the republic.
When Jefferson wanted a job done right, he did it himself.
What reader has not been infuriated at having to look up something in a book with no index? Serious books written in this century usually are indexed.
At the dawn of this century, a new form of residential architecture rose from the American heartland, ruled by the total integration of space, site, and structure.
After dinner, Frank Lloyd Wright would sometimes raise a wine glass, watch the yellow candlelight refracted through the red liquid and crystal, and, quoting the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu, remark that the reality of the vessel lay in the void within, “the pl
At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began.
Bank failure is as American as apple pie.
200 years ago, the United States was a weakling republic prostrate beneath a ruinous national debt. Then, Alexander Hamilton worked the miracle of fiscal imagination that made America a health,y young economic giant. How did he do it?
One price of political greatness is to be forced to campaign even long after death. The Founding Fathers, particularly, have been constantly dragged from their graves for partisan purposes.
Since the birth of the nation, the public’s perception of the quality of public schools has swung from approval to dismay and back again. Here, an eminent historian traces the course of school reform and finds that neither conservative nor liberal movements ever fully achieve their aims, which may be just as well.
In a historic meeting at Charlottesville, Virginia, last September, President George Bush and the nation’s governors promised to revitalize America’s public schools by establishing “clear national performance goals, goals that will make us internationally competitive.” Their la
Nothing is more seductive and false than the illusion of golden yesterdays, a spin-off of the undying human dream of lost innocence. I thought of this recently when I saw the grisly picture of a U.S.
A year ago, we were in the midst of a presidential campaign most memorable for charges by both sides that the opponent was not hard enough, tough enough, masculine enough. That he was, in fact, a sissy. Both sides also admitted that this sort of rhetoric was deplorable. But it’s been going on since the beginning of the republic.
Just before George Bush announced his running mate in 1988, a one-liner going the rounds was that he should choose Jeane Kirkpatrick to add some machismo to the ticket.
When the French Revolution broke out 200 years ago this month, Americans greeted it enthusiastically. After all, without the French, we could never have become free. But the cheers faded as the brutality of the convulsion emerged, and Americans realized that they were still only a feeble newborn facing a giant, intimidating world power.
There were two great revolutions against European monarchs in the late eighteenth century. In the first, the French nation helped Americans achieve their independence from George III.
He was a capitalist. He was an urban reformer. He was a country boy. He was “Comrade Jesus,” a hardworking socialist. He was the world’s first ad man. For a century and a half, novelists have been trying to recapture the “real” Jesus.
The two most popular novels in 19th-century America were Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (1880) and Charles Sheldon’s In His Steps (1896).
150 years ago, a sea of grass spread from the Ohio to the Rockies. Now, only bits and pieces of that awesome wilderness remain for the traveler to discover.
Behind my grandparents’ house, the house in which I was born, rose a high pasture, little used in my boyhood and then only for grazing a few head of cattle.
Every one of the founders was a historian who believed that only history could protect us from tyranny and coercion. In their reactions to the long, bloody pageant of the English past, we can see the framers’ intentions.
A knowledgeable and passionate guide takes us for a walk down Wall Street, and we find the buildings there eloquent of the whole history of American finance
One of the pleasant burdens of friendship, and of living in a renowned and intimidating great city like New York, is that friends planning to visit will ask me to show them the sights of some quarter of town, most usually in the borough of Manhattan, county o
The framers of the Constitution were proud of what they had done but might be astonished that their words still carry so much weight. A distinguished scholar tells us how the great charter has survived and flourished.
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
The Founding, Fathers never did agree about the proper relationship between church and state. No wonder the Supreme Court has been backing and filling on the principle ever since.
THE SUPREME COURT has been busy of late scrutinizing the “wall of separation,” a figure of speech attributed to Thomas Jefferson. It is not like the ugly Berlin Wall, built of concrete blocks and topped with broken glass and barbed wire.
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