Word: monticello
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...onslaught is unfair. But even ardent Jeffersonians admit that the man was an insoluble puzzle. The contradictions in his character and his ideas could be breathtaking. That the author of the Declaration of Independence ("All men are created equal") not only owned and worked slaves at Monticello but also may have kept one of them, Sally Hemings, as a mistress--allegedly fathering children with her but never freeing her or them--was merely the most dramatic of his inconsistencies...
...brilliant American icon gets overtaken from time to time by his own apparent incoherence, his strangeness. He kept minutely detailed account books, for example--he was an obsessive record keeper who made daily notes on everything from barometric readings to the progress of 29 varieties of vegetables at Monticello--yet he somehow lost track of his debts and died bankrupt. The historian Paul Johnson has catalogued a few of the inconsistencies: Jefferson was an elitist who complained bitterly of elites; a humorless man whose favorite books were Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy; a soft-spoken intellectual sometimes given to violent...
...paraphrase Tolstoy, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. While I can't imagine spending eternity at the side of a slave master, some of Hemings' descendants want to be buried in the family cemetery at Monticello. But some of the 700-member all-white Monticello Association don't want to let their black relatives in, even as corpses. They weren't even planning to invite Hemings' 33 known descendants to the reunion until Lucian Truscott IV--a writer who seems to have inherited more of Jefferson's spirit than the rest of the Monticello Association put together...
Facing strong, gusty crosswinds on Lake Monticello, near Charlottesville, Va., the No. 5 Radcliffe lightweight crew narrowly lost to No. 3 Virginia Saturday...
...white and black Hemings branches are embracing, making plans to hold a joint family reunion. They've been received less warmly by the Monticello Association, the organization of descendants of Jefferson's white daughters. For years they asserted the Hemings children were sired by one of Jefferson's wayward nephews. Now that the DNA tests have eliminated that possibility, they are suggesting there were other male Jeffersons who could have fathered Hemings' children. Jefferson biographer Joseph Ellis discounts this, saying circumstances bolster Madison's link to Jefferson and even call into question the nullification of the Thomas lineage...