Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination - Rilegato

Gordon-Reed, Annette; Onuf, Peter S.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0871404427 ISBN 13: 9780871404428

Casa editrice: Liveright Pub Corp, 2016

Riassunto

Thomas Jefferson is often portrayed as a hopelessly enigmatic figure—a riddle—a man so riven with contradictions that he is almost impossible to know. Lauded as the most articulate voice of American freedom and equality, even as he held people—including his own family—in bondage, Jefferson is variably described as a hypocrite, an atheist, or a simple-minded proponent of limited government who expected all Americans to be farmers forever.Now, Annette Gordon-Reed teams up with America's leading Jefferson scholar, Peter S. Onuf, to present an absorbing and revealing character study that dispels the many clichés that have accrued over the years about our third president. Challenging the widely prevalent belief that Jefferson remains so opaque as to be unknowable, the authors—through their careful analysis, painstaking research, and vivid prose—create a portrait of Jefferson, as he might have painted himself, one "comprised of equal parts sun and shadow" (Jane Kamensky).Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, the authors explore what they call the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination—an expansive state of mind born of his origins in a slave society, his intellectual influences, and the vaulting ambition that propelled him into public life as a modern avatar of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, likened himself to a figure of old—"the most blessed of the patriarchs." Indeed, Jefferson saw himself as a "patriarch," not just to his country and mountain-like home at Monticello but also to his family, the white half that he loved so publicly, as well as to the black side that he claimed to love, a contradiction of extraordinary historical magnitude."Most Blessed of the Patriarchs""Most Blessed of the Patriarchs"

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Informazioni sull'autore

Annette Gordon-Reed is the author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello and is Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School. Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Liveright Pub Corp
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0871404427
• ISBN 13: 9780871404428
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 370
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile