Word: jeffersons
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Clay Jenkinson, a humanities scholar, has teamed up with Melvin Kahn, a professor of political science at Wichita State University, to play Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton, Founding Fathers with very different ideas about government. Touring the Midwest, the actors have discovered that while most of their audiences sympathize with the populist views of Jefferson, they actually vote for Hamilton, whose vision of a strong central government they find more realistic. "I've come to the conclusion that we live in a Hamiltonian nation with a Jeffersonian rhetoric," says Jenkinson ruefully...
...world that has not formally begun converting to metric. There was a time, while Britain was the U.S.'s major trading partner, when it would have been economic suicide to consider switching to metric. In fact, it was precisely such arguments that torpedoed Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson's proposal that the U.S. adopt a decimal-based system in 1790. A study 31 years later by his successor, John Quincy Adams, was similarly unpersuasive. But in 1866, Congress, charged by the Constitution with establishing the nation's weights and measures, declared the metric system valid for "contracts, dealings or court...
...iron fails to find its collectors, and the productions of traveling limners evoke an enthusiasm that might once have seemed excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made at elegance" and that it was difficult to find a workman who could draw a column...
There lay the nub. One learns to design by looking at real buildings, not pattern books, and in America models were rare. You could not bring a building across the Atlantic -- or not yet; that was within Hearst's power, not Jefferson's -- and great paintings generally did not cross because the American market for them in the 1780s was so small. But fine furniture and silverware could be imported and were, so that the work of early republican and federal craftsmen in America tends to be more sophisticated than most architecture of the day. Most of it was English...
...architecture, the style was set going by Jefferson, the father of American architectural thought (as distinct from mere building). His particular inspiration was one structure, a Roman temple known as the Maison Carree at Nimes in the south of France. All the architectural work he had admired during his years as American Minister to France from 1785-89 -- Pierre Rousseau's Hotel de Salm, the Pantheon, the mock ruins of the Desert de Retz, the designs of dead masters like Andrea Palladio and living architects like Etienne Louis Boullee and Claude Nicolas Ledoux -- would leave their traces...