Thomas Jefferson Survives : American Independence in His Time and Ours

On the 250th anniversary of his greatest achievement, two leading historians take on the question, “Does Thomas Jefferson still matter?”

Fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reassured the nation from his deathbed, “Thomas Jefferson survives”. Unaware that Jefferson had died hours earlier, Adams was in a larger sense correct: Jefferson had been immortalised in the American imagination. Today, Jefferson has effectively become a partisan talisman—jettisoned by the left for his moral failings, embraced and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with the reductive clichés that now define Jefferson’s legacy, Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano restore the founding father to his historical context, elucidating how Jefferson’s understanding of history shaped his responses to the crises of his time, how he conceived of the physical entity that became the United States and how he articulated a new national identity in 1776. Through their search for understanding, Onuf and Cogliano demonstrate not only why Jefferson matters but how his wisdom can be applied today. Peter S. Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed’s “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs” was praised as:"An important book…[R]ichly rewarding. It is full of fascinating insights about Jefferson." —Gordon S. Wood, The New York Review of Books“A fresh and layered analysis...” –Peter Baker, The New York Times Book Review