Word: offing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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The truths that Jefferson famously declared to be "self-evident" were not new. He drew his ideas from an extraordinarily wide range of reading, especially from the works of Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke, and from the Scottish moral philosophers--Francis Hutcheson, Thomas Reid, David Hume, Adam...
Some have dismissed the Declaration as merely eloquent propaganda--a sort of fancy mission statement for an insurrection. The only response is to observe the power of language to alter history. Jefferson explained, "I did not consider it as any part of my charge to invent new ideas altogether... It...
The work of a life may transcend the biography; a civilized person, the slave-owning hypocrite--or whatever he may have been beneath the impenetrable enamels of his character--formulated, in the Declaration of Independence, the founding aspiration of America and what is still its best self, an ideal that...
In later years, he discerned how democracy could be distorted, pointing to Republican France and Napoleon (a "wretch," Jefferson declared, of "maniac ambition"; he added "Having been, like him, entrusted with the happiness of my country, I feel the blessing of resembling him in no other point"). Jefferson stitched together...
In 1926 the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "The greatest invention of the 19th century was the invention of the method of invention." That method, Whitehead added, "has broken up the foundations of the old civilization." Thomas Alva Edison never thought of himself as a revolutionary; he was a hardworking...