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, Paris—Jefferson loved America most, and he strove again and 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 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 Drawing on archives in the United States, England, and France, as well as unpublished Jefferson presidential papers, Meacham presents Jefferson as the most successful political leader of the early republic, and perhaps in all of American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.
Jon Meacham: “Thomas Jefferson: the Art of Power” | Talks at Google
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Is there some place where digital democracy can
contribute to the good as opposed to what I think it
tends to do now, which is reinforce preexisting biases.
I’m speaking in vastly oversimplified terms.
But one of the things that the digital revolution has made
You can make yourself heard anyway, whether it’s in
comment sections, or Twitter, or Facebook, whatever it is.
Every man is a pundit now.
And that’s great.
But with power comes responsibility.
And so as FDR once said, simply screaming from the
rooftops doesn’t help us a whole lot.
So is there a way to harness this amazing tool to create,
what one would argue, could be a more
constructive political dialogue?
I would hope so.
And I think we’re not even halfway through this, right?
These are the first moments of this.
And so I think you all–
I don’t mean to preach at you– but you all have a hell
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of a responsibility here.
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I mean, this is Google.
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Some guy last night in Seattle asked me where he could find a
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particular letter of Jefferson’s, and I thought he
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meant the idea.
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No, he meant the letter, the actual one he’d written.
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And so I said, well, I don’t have the date off
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the top of my head.
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He said, well, do I have to Google it?
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I said, well, if you have to ask, then yes you do.
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That’s a key thing.
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So you’re a verb.
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So you’re one of the key cultural landmarks of the age.
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So I think that there’s an enormous responsibility there
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to try to figure out how do you use this immense sea?
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How do you channel it into productive ways?
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So I should be asking you all this, is my point.
Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection
Today I talked to Matthew Crow about his book Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. Crow studies how Jefferson’s association with legal history was born out of America’s long history as part of an early modern empire and the political thought which preceded him. By examining how Jefferson’s own development within this world, Crow finds that legal history was a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, which Jefferson deployed in his own constitutional, political, and racial thinking.
Matthew Crow Associate Professor of History at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. He specializes in Early American, intellectual, and constitutional history.
‘Jefferson’s Pillow’
Yet I am always acutely aware that however noble their accomplishments, Jefferson and his fellow Virginians George Washington, George Mason, and James Madison — great patriots and founders all — lived lives cushioned by slavery. They were also the conveyors of the culture that has done and continues to do hideous damage to millions of black human beings and to many more millions of white Americans as well. They created a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that whites were and should be supreme. They celebrated freedom while stealing the substance of life from the people they “owned.” They fought off the mightiest military power then on earth with the cry “We will not be slaves!” And they created the country that gives me, the descendant of slaves and slave owners, much of the context for my existence, the freedom that I cherish and the democratic citizenship that I have used relentlessly for the past half century.
.. For many Southern whites, the outcome of the Civil War brought a loss of prestige, power, and privilege, and some of the resulting resentment was felt in the North as well. Black people and white people became for each other color-coded symbols of the things they had lost or never achieved, and of the things they continued to resent and fear.
.. And yet I feel and look American, and I have labored over the years to make the Constitution work for everyone. Does that make me a patriot? Can I embrace founders who may have “owned” some of my ancestors? Can I try to see them in their complexity and understand them — even identify with them? Can I see myself and my ancestors as active participants in a history from which we are too often absent?