Download or read book Twilight at Monticello written by Alan Pell Crawford and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2008 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A portrait of Thomas Jefferson's retirement years at Monticello captures a turbulent period in the former president's life marked by personal and financial problems, depression, the disintegration of his family, and the founding of the University of Virgi
Download or read book Twilight at Monticello written by Alan Pell Crawford and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2009-02-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written about Thomas Jefferson, and with good reason: He was the architect of our democracy, a visionary chief executive who expanded this nation’s physical boundaries to unimagined lengths. But Twilight at Monticello is entirely new: an unprecedented look at the intimate Jefferson in his final years–from his return to Monticello in 1809 after two terms as president until his death in 1826–that will change the way readers think about this American icon. Basing his narrative on new research and documents culled from the Library of Congress, the Virginia Historical Society, and other special collections, Alan Pell Crawford paints an authoritative, deeply moving portrait of the private Jefferson–the first original depiction of the man in more than a generation. Though physical illness and family troubles, Jefferson remained a viable political force, receiving dignitaries and corresponding with close friends, including John Adams and other heroes from the Revolution; helping his neighbor James Madison during his presidency; and establishing the University of Virginia. It was also during these years that Jefferson’s idealism would be most severely, and heartbreakingly, tested.
Download or read book Twilight at Monticello written by William Harwood Peden and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Unwise Passions written by Alan Pell Crawford and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2000 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This true story of sex, murder, and corruption in 18th century Virginia centers on Nancy Randolph, an attractive woman from a wealthy and socially prominent family, who lived with her sister and brother-in-law, Richard Randolph. After rumors that Nancy bore Richard's child, and that he killed the child, a trial ensued with Patrick Henry defending Richard. Maps and illustrations.
Download or read book American Sphinx written by Joseph J. Ellis and published by Vintage. This book was released on 1998-11-19 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER Following Thomas Jefferson from the drafting of the Declaration of Independence to his retirement in Monticello, Joseph J. Ellis unravels the contradictions of the Jeffersonian character. He gives us the slaveholding libertarian who was capable of decrying mescegenation while maintaing an intimate relationship with his slave, Sally Hemmings; the enemy of government power who exercisdd it audaciously as president; the visionarty who remained curiously blind to the inconsistencies in his nature. American Sphinx is a marvel of scholarship, a delight to read, and an essential gloss on the Jeffersonian legacy.
Download or read book Saving Monticello written by Marc Leepson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2002-03-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The complete history of Thomas Jefferson's iconic American home, Monticello, and how it was not only saved after Jefferson's death, but ultimately made into a National Historic Landmark. When Thomas Jefferson died on the Fourth of July 1826, he was more than $100,000 in debt. Forced to sell thousands of acres of his lands and nearly all of his furniture and artwork, in 1831 his heirs bid a final goodbye to Monticello itself. The house their illustrious patriarch had lovingly designed in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, his beloved "essay in architecture," was sold to the highest bidder. So how did it become the national landmark it is today? Saving Monticello offers the first complete post-Jefferson history of this American icon and reveals the amazing story of how one Jewish family saved the house that became their family home. With a dramatic narrative sweep across generations, Marc Leepson vividly recounts the turbulent saga of this fabled estate. Monticello's first savior was the mercurial U.S. Navy Commodore Uriah Phillips Levy, a sailor celebrated for his successful campaign to ban flogging in the Navy and excoriated for his stubborn willfulness. In 1833, Levy discovered that Jefferson's mansion had fallen into a miserable state of decay. Acquiring the ruined estate and committing his considerable resources to its renewal, he began what became a tumultuous nine-decade relationship between his family and Jefferson's home. After passing from Levy control at the time of the commodore's death, Monticello fell once more into hard times. Again, a member of the Levy family came to the rescue. Uriah's nephew, a three-term New York congressman and wealthy real estate and stock speculator, gained possession in 1879. After Jefferson Levy poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into its repair and upkeep, his chief reward was to face a vicious national campaign, with anti-Semitic overtones, to expropriate the house and turn it over to the government. Only after the campaign had failed, with Levy declaring that he would sell Monticello only when the White House itself was offered for sale, did Levy relinquish it to the Thomas Jefferson Foundation in 1923. Pulling back the veil of history to reveal a story we thought we knew, Saving Monticello establishes this most American of houses as more truly reflective of the American experience than has ever been fully appreciated.
Download or read book The Jefferson Lies written by David Barton and published by Thomas Nelson Inc. This book was released on 2012 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Noted historian Barton sets the record straight on the lies and misunderstandings that have tarnished the legacy of Thomas Jefferson.
Download or read book My Monticello written by Jocelyn Nicole Johnson and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A badass debut by any measure—nimble, knowing, and electrifying.” —Colson Whitehead, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle "...'My Monticello' is, quite simply, an extraordinary debut from a gifted writer with an unflinching view of history and what may come of it." — The Washington Post Winner of the Weatherford Award in Fiction A winner of 2022 Lillian Smith Book Awards A young woman descended from Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings driven from her neighborhood by a white militia. A university professor studying racism by conducting a secret social experiment on his own son. A single mother desperate to buy her first home even as the world hurtles toward catastrophe. Each fighting to survive in America. Tough-minded, vulnerable, and brave, Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s precisely imagined debut explores burdened inheritances and extraordinary pursuits of belonging. Set in the near future, the eponymous novella, “My Monticello,” tells of a diverse group of Charlottesville neighbors fleeing violent white supremacists. Led by Da’Naisha, a young Black descendant of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, they seek refuge in Jefferson’s historic plantation home in a desperate attempt to outlive the long-foretold racial and environmental unravelling within the nation. In “Control Negro,” hailed by Roxane Gay as “one hell of story,” a university professor devotes himself to the study of racism and the development of ACMs (average American Caucasian males) by clinically observing his own son from birth in order to “painstakingly mark the route of this Black child too, one whom I could prove was so strikingly decent and true that America could not find fault in him unless we as a nation had projected it there.” Johnson’s characters all seek out home as a place and an internal state, whether in the form of a Nigerian widower who immigrates to a meager existence in the city of Alexandria, finding himself adrift; a young mixed-race woman who adopts a new tongue and name to escape the landscapes of rural Virginia and her family; or a single mother who seeks salvation through “Buying a House Ahead of the Apocalypse.” United by these characters’ relentless struggles against reality and fate, My Monticello is a formidable book that bears witness to this country’s legacies and announces the arrival of a wildly original new voice in American fiction.
Download or read book The Sage of Monticello written by Dumas Malone and published by Little Brown & Company. This book was released on 1981 with total page 551 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concluding volume of this six part biography focuses on Jefferson's accomplishments after his retirement from the presidency
Download or read book Most Blessed of the Patriarchs Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination written by Annette Gordon-Reed and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2016-04-13 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the San Francisco Chronicle Finalist for the George Washington Prize Finalist for the Library of Virginia Literary Award A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection "An important book…[R]ichly rewarding. It is full of fascinating insights about Jefferson." —Gordon S. Wood, New York Review of Books Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs" is one of the richest and most insightful accounts of Thomas Jefferson in a generation. Following her Pulitzer Prize–winning The Hemingses of Monticello¸ Annette Gordon-Reed has teamed with Peter S. Onuf to present a provocative and absorbing character study, "a fresh and layered analysis" (New York Times Book Review) that reveals our third president as "a dynamic, complex and oftentimes contradictory human being" (Chicago Tribune). Gordon-Reed and Onuf fundamentally challenge much of what we thought we knew, and through their painstaking research and vivid prose create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one "comprised of equal parts sun and shadow" (Jane Kamensky).
Download or read book Jefferson s Secrets written by Andrew Burstein and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2006-03-21 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, leaving behind a series of mysteries that captured the imaginations of historical investigators-an interest rekindled by the recent revelation that he fathered a child by Sally Hemmings, a woman he legally owned-yet there is still surprisingly little known about him as a man. In Jefferson's Secrets Andrew Burstein focuses on Jefferson's last days to create an emotionally powerful portrait of the uncensored private citizen who was also a giant of a man. Drawing on sources previous biographers have glossed over or missed entirely, Burstein uncovers, first and foremost, how Jefferson confronted his own mortality; and in doing so, he reveals how he viewed his sexual choices. Delving into Jefferson's soul, Burstein lays bare the president's thoughts about his own legacy, his predictions for American democracy, and his feelings regarding women and religion. The result is a moving and surprising work of history that sets a new standard, post-DNA, for the next generation's reassessment of the most evocative and provocative of this country's founders.
Download or read book Whittaker Chambers written by Sam Tanenhaus and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2011-04-20 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whittaker Chambers is the first biography of this complex and enigmatic figure. Drawing on dozens of interviews and on materials from forty archives in the United States and abroad--including still-classified KGB dossiers--Tanenhaus traces the remarkable journey that led Chambers from a sleepy Long Island village to center stage in America's greatest political trial and then, in his last years, to a unique role as the godfather of post-war conservatism. This biography is rich in startling new information about Chambers's days as New York's "hottest literary Bolshevik"; his years as a Communist agent and then defector, hunted by the KGB; his conversion to Quakerism; his secret sexual turmoil; his turbulent decade at Time magazine, where he rose from the obscurity of the book-review page to transform the magazine into an oracle of apocalyptic anti-Communism. But all this was a prelude to the memorable events that began in August 1948, when Chambers testified against Alger Hiss in the spy case that changed America. Whittaker Chambers goes far beyond all previous accounts of the Hiss case, re-creating its improbably twists and turns, and disentangling the motives that propelled a vivid cast of characters in unpredictable directions. A rare conjunction of exacting scholarship and narrative art, Whittaker Chambers is a vivid tapestry of 20th century history.
Download or read book The True Geography of Our Country written by Joel Kovarsky and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosopher, architect, astronomer, and polymath, Thomas Jefferson lived at a time when geography was considered the "mother of all sciences." Although he published only a single printed map, Jefferson was also regarded as a geographer, owing to his interest in and use of geographic and cartographic materials during his many careers—attorney, farmer, sometime surveyor, and regional and national politician—and in his twilight years at Monticello. For roughly twenty-five years he was involved in almost all elements of the urban planning of Washington, D.C., and his surveying skills were reflected in his architectural drawings, including those of the iconic grounds of the University of Virginia. He understood maps not only as valuable for planning but as essential for future land claims and development, exploration and navigation, and continental commercial enterprise. In The True Geography of Our Country: Jefferson’s Cartographic Vision, Joel Kovarsky charts the importance of geography and maps as foundational for Jefferson’s lifelong pursuits. Although the world had already seen the Age of Exploration and the great sea voyages of Captain James Cook, Jefferson lived in a time when geography was of primary importance, prefiguring the rapid specializations of the mid- to late-nineteenth-century world. In this illustrated exploration of Jefferson’s passion for geography—including his role in planning the route followed and regions explored by Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, as well as other expeditions into the vast expanse of the Louisiana Purchase—Kovarsky reveals how geographical knowledge was essential to the manifold interests of the Sage of Monticello.
Download or read book Personal Notes written by Sandra E. Lamb and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you dread writing notes to say "Thank you," "I'm sorry," or "Congratulations"? When's the last time you sent a handwritten letter to a faraway friend, just to catch up? What should you write to a grieving friend or colleague? How do you let friends know you're getting a divorce? As our lives get busier and faster-paced, the old-fashioned art of personal correspondence is becoming sadly lost. In this upbeat, wise, and witty guide, journalist and lifestyle expert Sandra Lamb offers a wealth of advice, inspiration, and examples for anyone who wants to add flair, voice, and plain old fun to their letters and notes---as well as anyone who wants to know the etiquette of when and what to write. Using colorful examples and practical advice, the book covers thank yous, congratulations, engagements and weddings, birthdays and anniversaries, births and adoptions, appreciation, love notes, illness and accidents, divorce, condolence, regrets, apologies, and forgiveness. This delightful, indispensable guide helps us rediscover the joy of connecting with others through the simple act of putting pen to paper.
Download or read book How Not to Get Rich written by Alan Pell Crawford and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2017 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A detailed and humorous account of the various disastrous money schemes and entrepreneurial pursuits of Mark Twain, who was noted for his spectacularly bad financial decisions during the Gilded Age
Download or read book Jane Addams Spirit in Action written by Louise W. Knight and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2010-09-06 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this landmark biography, Jane Addams becomes America's most admired and most hated woman—and wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Jane Addams (1860-1935) was a leading statesperson in an era when few imagined such possibilities for women. In this fresh interpretation, the first full biography of Addams in nearly forty years, Louise W. Knight shows Addams's boldness, creativity, and tenacity as she sought ways to put the ideals of democracy into action. Starting in Chicago as a co-founder of the nation's first settlement house, Hull House—a community center where people of all classes and ethnicities could gather—Addams became a grassroots organizer and a partner of trade unionists, women, immigrants, and African Americans seeking social justice. In time she emerged as a progressive political force; an advocate for women's suffrage; an advisor to presidents; a co-founder of civil rights organizations, including the NAACP; and a leader for international peace. Written as a fast-paced narrative, Jane Addams traces how one woman worked with others to make a difference in the world.
Download or read book The Beautiful Cigar Girl written by Daniel Stashower and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On July 28, 1841, the body of Mary Rogers, a twenty-year-old cigar girl, was found floating in the Hudson-and New York's unregulated police force proved incapable of solving the crime. One year later, a struggling writer named Edgar Allan Poe decided to take on the case-and sent his fictional detective, C. Auguste Dupin, to solve the baffling murder of Mary Rogers in "The Mystery of Marie Rog t."
