Word: virginias
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...helped launch and justify raged on, the enemy's army had swept through his state capital only hours before and his successor as Virginia's Governor still hadn't been selected by the legislature, but Thomas Jefferson was going home, convinced that his work for America was done. It was the summer of 1781, five years since the July in Philadelphia when the author of the Declaration of Independence had, in two inspired weeks of writing energized by years of thought and study and practical political activity, helped create a new nation with his pen. The course this nation would...
...great revolutionary was calling it quits--or so he told his friends. In one of more than 20,000 letters that scholars estimate Jefferson completed before his death on July 4, 1826, the future Secretary of State, Vice President, two-term President and founder of the University of Virginia confirmed his premature decision to abandon the rigors of government service for the pleasures of rural solitude: "I have taken my final leave of everything of that nature, have retired to my farm, my family and books from which I think nothing will ever more separate...
...bicentennial of his re-election as President, Jefferson still intrigues Americans for another reason: his tantalizing inner complexity. The tall, soft-spoken Virginia squire who loved fine wines and whose enormous book collection became the core of the Library of Congress was no unfeeling, detached egghead but a passionate, somewhat elusive human being. When his wife Martha died in 1782, he wrapped a lock of her hair with a scrap of paper containing an excerpt from the couple's favorite novel, Laurence Sterne's comic masterpiece, Tristram Shandy, and stashed the token in his desk. Four years later, while serving...
Some things haven't changed since Jefferson's time, though, and one of them is the country's ongoing struggle with the role of religion in civic life. As the author of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which prohibited government interference in people's religious beliefs, Jefferson took a hard line in this regard, and it isn't difficult to imagine where he would stand on current debates about prayer in public schools, say, or faith-based funding for social projects. "If there is one field of constitutional law, and law generally, where Jefferson was amazing...
...disco, spinning dumbly at the continuous vroom of oblivious Ferraris. A few years ago, staring despondently across Kensington Gardens through a late spring haze, I found myself looking into the far reaches of the old, overgrown empire—fertile Punjab farms, the plains of Kenya, the plantations of Virginia. The finished postcard canvas was cold and foreboding: Ferraris and investment banks and high manners alongside Wordsworth’s thronged alleys; abject poverty beside obscene wealth is a good place to write history or poetry but not much of a place to live...