Who was the 'real' Thomas Jefferson? If this question has an answer, it will probably not be revealed to anyone attempting to read the many accounts of his life. For two centuries biographers have provided divergent perspectives on him as a man and conflicting appraisals of his accomplishments. Controversial in his own time, Jefferson's propensity to polarize continued in the years after his death as biographers battled to control the commanding heights of history. To judge from their depictions, there existed many different Thomas Jeffersons. This book explores how individual biographers have shaped history -- as well as how the interests and preoccupations of the times in which they wrote helped to shape their portrayals of Jefferson. In different eras biographers presented the third president as a proponent of individual rights and majority rule, as a unifier and a fierce partisan, as well as a champion of American nationalism and global citizenship. Conscripted to serve Whigs and Democrats, abolitionists and slaveholders, unionists and secessionists, Populists and Progressives, and seemingly every side of just about every subsequent struggle, the only constant was that Jefferson's image remained a mirror of Americans' self-conscious understanding of their nation's virtues and vices. Thomas Jefferson's Lives brings together leading scholars of Jefferson and his era, all of whom embrace the challenge to assess some of the most important and enduring accounts of Jefferson's life--
- | Author: Robert M. S. Mcdonald
- | Publisher: University Of Virginia Press
- | Publication Date: Aug 27, 2019
- | Number of Pages: 344 pages
- | Language: English
- | Binding: Hardcover
- | ISBN-10: 0813942918
- | ISBN-13: 9780813942919
