Thomas Jefferson, Genius of Liberty Hardcover - 2000

From the publisher

April 2000 will launch a panoply of events celebrating the Library of Congress's 200th anniversary, the star of which will be exhibition Thomas Jefferson: Genius of Liberty. Featuring more than 150 valuable and historic items and a rare public display of the Jefferson library that is the nucleus of the Library's collections, both tine exhibition and its companion book will seek out the complex character, ideals, and motivations behind the mythic founding achievements of this brilliant son of the Enlightenment.

The book's lively narrative, illuminated by Jefferson's own words, weaves back and forth between the public career -- delegate to the Continental Congress, author of the Declaration of Independence and other calls to liberty, governor of Virginia, two-term president -- and his life at his beloved plantation and house, Monticello. Commentaries on manuscripts explore the conflicts between his public ideals, political realities, and his private life, including the recent controversial evidence of a long liaison with his slave Sally Hemings. From his worldview to his family relationships, Thomas Jefferson provides a new and intimate sense of the man historians have only recently begun to extricate from thc lofty abstractions that have born his name.