The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series, Volume 14 PDF Download

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400890470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 789

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Book Description
The 637 documents in this volume span 1 February to 31 August 1819. As a founding member of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors, Jefferson helps to obtain builders for the infant institution, responds to those seeking professorships, and orchestrates the establishment of a classical preparatory school in Charlottesville. In a letter to Vine Utley, Jefferson details his daily regimen of a largely vegetarian diet, bathing his feet in cold water each morning, and horseback riding. Continuing to indulge his wide-ranging intellectual interests, Jefferson receives publications on the proper pronunciation of Greek and discusses the subject himself in a letter to John Adams. Jefferson also experiences worrying and painful events, including hailstorm damage at his Poplar Forest estate, a fire in the North Pavilion at Monticello, the illness of his slave Burwell Colbert, and a fracas in which Jefferson's grandson-in-law Charles Bankhead stabs Jefferson's grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph on court day in Charlottesville. Worst of all, Jefferson's financial problems greatly increase when the bankruptcy of his friend Wilson Cary Nicholas leaves Jefferson responsible for $20,000 in notes he had endorsed for Nicholas.

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691255202
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 772

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Book Description
A definitive new volume of the retirement papers of Thomas Jefferson During the period covered by the 575 documents in this volume, Jefferson advises President James Monroe on what later becomes known as the “Monroe Doctrine.” He also approves of the Greek independence movement in correspondence with the scholar and political leader Adamantios Coray. Jefferson says that the “most dangerous blot” on the U.S. Constitution is the provision under which a vote by the states in the House of Representatives decides elections not settled by the Electoral College. With his allies in Virginia’s General Assembly, he succeeds in converting the University of Virginia’s loans from the state Literary Fund into an outright grant and obtains an additional $50,000 for books and scientific instruments. He seeks advice on regulating and equipping the institution, helps to obtain its architectural capitals, and designs its gymnasia. Jefferson describes coffee as “the favorite beverage of the civilised world” and advises a namesake child to “Adore God. reverence and cherish your parents. love your neighbor as yourself; and your country more than life. be just. be true. murmur not at the ways of Providence, and the life into which you have entered will be the passage to one of eternal and ineffable bliss.”

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691164118
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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Book Description
The Retirement Series documents Jefferson's written legacy between his return to private life on 4 March 1809 and his death on 4 July 1826. During this period Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and sold his extraordinary library to the nation, but his greatest legacy from these years is the astonishing depth and breadth of his correspondence with statesmen, inventors, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens on topics spanning virtually every field of human endeavor.--From publisher description.

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691229252
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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Book Description
"The Retirement Series documents Jefferson's written legacy between his return to private life on 4 March 1809 and his death on 4 July 1826. During this period Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and sold his extraordinary library to the nation, but his greatest legacy from these years is the astonishing depth and breadth of his correspondence with statesmen, inventors, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens on topics spanning virtually every field of human endeavor."--

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691185190
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 790

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Book Description
The 580 documents in this volume cover a wide range of fascinating topics. Jefferson receives impressions of a mammoth's tooth, altitude and meteorological observations, a call for a national pharmacopoeia, a discussion of primeval geology, and a letter that elicits Jefferson’s opinion that cognition exists "in animal bodies certainly, in Vegetables probably, in Minerals not impossibly." Jefferson leases his Tufton and Lego plantations to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph. The directors of the Rivanna Company rebut Jefferson’s 1817 bill of complaint and he unwittingly ensures his eventual financial ruin by endorsing notes totaling $20,000 for Wilson Cary Nicholas. Jefferson adds to the collections of the American Philosophical Society and writes an extended introduction to the "Anas," a corpus of official papers and political anecdotes documenting his service as George Washington’s secretary of state. Jefferson drafts legislation to establish a public education system in Virginia. He attends a Masonic cornerstone laying ceremony for the nascent Central College’s first pavilion early in October 1817 and is greatly pleased by the passage on 21 February 1818 of a law establishing a commission to plan a new state university, raising his hopes that Central College might soon become the University of Virginia.

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691185212
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
This volume's 598 documents span 22 April 1818 to 31 January 1819. Jefferson spends months preparing for a meeting to choose the site of the state university. He drafts the Rockfish Gap Report recommending the location of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville as well as legislation confirming this decision. Jefferson travels to Warm Springs to cure his rheumatism but instead contracts a painful infection on his buttocks. His enforced absence from Poplar Forest leads to detailed correspondence with plantation manager Joel Yancey. A work that Jefferson helped translate, Destutt de Tracy’s Treatise on Political Economy, is finally published. Salma Hale visits Monticello and describes Jefferson’s views on food, wine, and religion. In acknowledging an oration by Mordecai M. Noah, Jefferson remarks that the suffering of members of the Jewish faith "has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance." He receives long discussions of occult science and the nature of light by Robert Miller and Gabriel Crane. Abigail Adams dies, and Jefferson assures John Adams that their own demise will result in “an ecstatic meeting with the friends we have loved & lost and whom we shall still love and never lose again.”

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691189110
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 755

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Book Description
The 618 documents in this volume span 1 September 1819 to 31 May 1820. Jefferson suffers from a “colic,” recovery from which requires extensive rest and medication. He spends much time dealing with the immediate effects of the $20,000 addition to his debts resulting from his endorsement of notes for the bankrupt Wilson Cary Nicholas. Jefferson begins to correspond with his carpenter, the enslaved John Hemmings, as Hemmings undertakes maintenance and construction work at Poplar Forest. Jefferson and his allies in the state legislature obtain authorization for a $60,000 loan for the fledgling University of Virginia, the need for which becomes painfully clear when university workmen complain that they have not been paid during seven months of construction work. In the spring of 1820, following congressional discussion leading to the Missouri Compromise, Jefferson writes that the debate, “like a fire bell in the night, awakened and filled me with terror,” and that with regard to slavery, Americans have “the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go.”

Author: Thomas Jefferson
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691156700
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 842

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Book Description
The Retirement Series documents Jefferson's written legacy between his return to private life on 4 March 1809 and his death on 4 July 1826. During this period Jefferson founded the University of Virginia and sold his extraordinary library to the nation, but his greatest legacy from these years is the astonishing depth and breadth of his correspondence with statesmen, inventors, scientists, philosophers, and ordinary citizens on topics spanning virtually every field of human endeavor.--From publisher description.

Author: Jordan Ellenberg
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1984879065
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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Book Description
An instant New York Times Bestseller! “Unreasonably entertaining . . . reveals how geometric thinking can allow for everything from fairer American elections to better pandemic planning.” —The New York Times From the New York Times-bestselling author of How Not to Be Wrong—himself a world-class geometer—a far-ranging exploration of the power of geometry, which turns out to help us think better about practically everything. How should a democracy choose its representatives? How can you stop a pandemic from sweeping the world? How do computers learn to play Go, and why is learning Go so much easier for them than learning to read a sentence? Can ancient Greek proportions predict the stock market? (Sorry, no.) What should your kids learn in school if they really want to learn to think? All these are questions about geometry. For real. If you're like most people, geometry is a sterile and dimly remembered exercise you gladly left behind in the dust of ninth grade, along with your braces and active romantic interest in pop singers. If you recall any of it, it's plodding through a series of miniscule steps only to prove some fact about triangles that was obvious to you in the first place. That's not geometry. Okay, it is geometry, but only a tiny part, which has as much to do with geometry in all its flush modern richness as conjugating a verb has to do with a great novel. Shape reveals the geometry underneath some of the most important scientific, political, and philosophical problems we face. Geometry asks: Where are things? Which things are near each other? How can you get from one thing to another thing? Those are important questions. The word "geometry"comes from the Greek for "measuring the world." If anything, that's an undersell. Geometry doesn't just measure the world—it explains it. Shape shows us how.

Author: Clement Fatovic
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
ISBN: 0700621733
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
If, as many allege, attacking the gap between rich and poor is a form of class warfare, then the struggle against income inequality is the longest running war in American history. To defenders of the status quo, who argue that the accumulation of wealth free of government intervention is an essential feature of the American way, this book offers a forceful answer. While many of those who oppose addressing economic inequality through public policy today do so in the name of freedom, Clement Fatovic demonstrates that concerns about freedom informed the Founding Fathers' arguments for public policy that tackled economic disparities. Where contemporary arguments against such government efforts conceptualize freedom in economic terms, however, those supporting public policies conducive to greater economic equality invoked a more participatory, republican, conception of freedom. As many of the Founders understood it, economic independence, which requires a wide if imperfect distribution of property, is a precondition of the political independence they so profoundly valued. Fatovic reveals a deep concern among the Founders--including Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and Noah Webster--about the impact of economic inequality on political freedom. America's Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality traces this concern through many important political debates in Congress and the broader polity that shaped the early Republic--debates over tax policies, public works, public welfare, and the debt from the Revolution. We see how Alexander Hamilton, so often characterized as a cold-hearted apologist for plutocrats, actually favored a more progressive system of taxation, along with various policies aimed at easing the economic hardship of specific groups. In Thomas Paine, frequently portrayed as an advocate of laissez-faire government, we find a champion of a comprehensive welfare state that would provide old-age pensions, public housing, and a host of other benefits as a matter of "right, not charity." Contrary to the picture drawn by so many of today's pundits and politicians, this book shows us how, for the first American statesmen, preventing or minimizing economic disparities was essential to the preservation of the new nation's freedom and practice of self-government.