Thomas Jefferson's Education
20 November 2020
Description
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a brilliant, absorbing study of Jefferson and his campaign to save Virginia through education.
By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully crafted history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. Thomas Jefferson shares centre stage with his family and fellow planters, all dependent on the labour of enslaved black families. With a declining Virginia yielding to commercially vibrant northern states, in 1819 Jefferson proposed to build a university to educate and improve the sons of the planter elite. He hoped they might one day lead a revitalised Virginia free of slavery—and free of the former slaves.
Jefferson’s campaign was a contest for the future of a state and the larger nation. Although he prevails, Jefferson’s vision of reform through education is hobbled by the actions of genteel students with a defiant sense of honour derived from owning slaves. It is the women of this hypermasculine society who redeem the best elements of his legacy.
Reviews
"Taylor probes [Jefferson’s] ambitious mission in clear prose and with great insight and erudition." — Annette Gordon-Reed, Atlantic
"Taylor has an important message... for a university community still haunted by Jefferson‚ s shadow... [The university‚] beginnings . . . were in every aspect inseparable from the distorting and poisonous influence of the slave society Jefferson hoped his" — The Washington Post
Also By: Alan Taylor 
American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873
Hardback, 2024
A Pulitzer Prize winner's masterful history of the American Civil War and its reverberations across the continent
American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
Paperback, 2022
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a precarious United States as it expands across a contested continent
American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
Hardback, 2021
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a precarious United States as it expands across a contested continent.
American Republics: A Continental History of the United States, 1783-1850
E Book, 2021
From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian, the powerful story of a precarious United States as it expands across a contested continent
American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804
Paperback, 2017
From a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a fresh, authoritative history that recasts thinking about America’s founding period.
