Thomas Jeffersons Education, Alan Taylor
Thomas Jeffersons Education, Alan Taylor
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Thomas Jefferson's Education

Author: Alan Taylor

Narrator: Jason Culp

Unabridged: 13 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 10/15/2019


Synopsis

From a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education.
By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello. Never quite the egalitarian we wish him to be, he advocated emancipation but shrank from implementing it, entrusting that reform to the next generation. Devoted to the education of his granddaughters, he nevertheless accepted their subordination in a masculine culture. During the revolution, he proposed to educate all white children in Virginia, but later in life he narrowed his goal to building an elite university.
In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. Opening in 1825, the university nearly collapsed as unruly students abused one another, the enslaved servants, and the faculty. Jefferson’s hopes of developing an enlightened leadership for the state were disappointed, and Virginia hardened its commitment to slavery in the coming years. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.

About Alan Taylor

Alan Taylor is the author of William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for American History and The Internal Enemy, which won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for American History. Taylor is Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ddoddmccue on November 02, 2019

Thomas Jefferson's Education was an eye opening account of the varied efforts of Thomas Jefferson to influence Virginia's post-revolutionary history. Veiled as educational aspirations, Jefferson's ideas included the brilliant and the undeniably flawed stands on the political, societal, and economic,......more

Goodreads review by James on July 09, 2020

As a graduate of U.Va who relished the beloved traditions of my alma mater, I’m grateful that one of its own professors has written this timely and necessary corrective. If you are looking for a straightforward chronological history of the University of Virginia this is not the book for you. If you......more

Goodreads review by Debra on May 16, 2020

A history of education during the slavery era, with an emphasis on Jefferson's University of Virginia. Not what I was expecting (which is probably my fault) but glad that I listened anyway.......more

Goodreads review by Tascha on October 22, 2022

Taylor's books always do a great job of getting you inside the mind of people in a different time, and this one does as good a job or better as any of his great books. It does have a bit of a Jordan Peele movie feel in that it is inevitably terrifying to get inside the minds of people for whom whipp......more

Goodreads review by Richard on April 12, 2020

I really did not know what to expect when I purchased this book. I recall reading one of Taylor's works a while back (a really long while back) in college. I am eternally fascinated by the paradox that is Jefferson and the book promised to tell the story of his founding of the University of Virginia......more