Thomas Jefferson, Race, Slavery, and the Problem of American Nationhood

Professor Annette Gordon-Reed and Professor Peter Onuf, authors of Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination, will deliver a lecture on their ongoing research on Thomas Jefferson and his world.

Danielle Allen, author of Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality, has said, “A peerless team, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf pierce the mysteries of Jefferson’s character and at last offer a compelling explanation of how the republican statesman and plantation patriarch could coexist in a single soul. Jefferson’s flaw was not hypocrisy but conviction, his unswerving belief in paternalism as empowering and beneficent.”

Originally published at diversity.nd.edu.