This is a really a great collection of Thomas Jefferson's views on liberty, slavery,democratic government, social policy in a republic, education, etc. Forget all of the "interpretations" or "revisionist" histories by professional historians, instead pick up this book and read about one of the greatest philosophers of human liberty and democracy. Reading Jefferson in his original words without the personal views of the historical crowd really brings out his true vision for a great republic. A great buy.

Charles Wiltse's the Jeffersonian Tradition in American Democracy is a very good account of the intellectual background and philosophy of Thomas Jefferson. Wiltse starts out with the intellectual background for Enlightenment thought in Great Britian and France. It is shown how the philosophy of republicanism and libertarian thought progressed from the mid 17th century to the time of Jefferson.

Next Jefferson's intellectual background is explored. Locke, Bacon, Newton, Sidney, and Lord Kames are shown to be the main influences on our greatest founder. It then moves to Jefferson's progressive philosophy of liberty and republican thought. Public education, religious freedom, the abolition of slavery, ending primogenture and entail, and a republican constitution consume the mind of Jefferson.

Wiltse also goes into Jefferson's philosophy for "ward republics",a form of grass roots democracy. He details Jefferson's passion for ward republics to be the "salvation of the republic" as he called it. The main thing that makes this work so good id that it lacks the anti-intellectual postmodern "deconstruction" of Jefferson. No political correctness or extreme "presentism" viewpoint. A really good book for a Jeffersonian education.

Janet Sharp Hermann has done a magnificent job of portraying this giant of a man. It is a spellbound account of a time and a place now almost forgotten. Her scholarship and research talents are made plain by the way she brings out the nature of Joseph E. Davis and his relationship with his family and especially his servants. His forbearance and high-spirited way of coping with the adversity he faced over the destruction of his property during the Civil War and the after-years were inspiring.

In his new biography Joseph Jefferson: Dean of American Theatre Arthur Bloom captures the life of one of the most compelling figures in the history of American Entertainment. As a comic actor and producer, Joseph Jefferson stood alone at the head of his art. In terms of financial and critical success, Jefferson had no rival. He built this success, for the most part, by perfecting a stage version of Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle". A role which Bloom shows Jefferson lived off-stage as well. Like Will Rogers and comics who followed, Jefferson traded on a home-spun simple image. For years and years audiences packed houses to see the simple character Rip experience the extraordinary. However, behind this mask was a man who lived a luxuriant life, and cultivated fame at the cost of artistic growth. In his life, Jefferson was filled with contradictions. He was the common man in public, and a pampered man in private.

It is the contradictions in Jefferson's life that Bloom reveals for the first time in this biography, and captures with great detail. Before he died, Jefferson had published and enormous autobiography which is charming and seemingly the last word on the subject of Jefferson's life. Fortunately, Bloom penetrates the amiable facade of Jefferson without viciousness. Indeed, the contradictions which Jefferson would have hid from the public, make him all the more appealing as subject for biography. Jefferson's response to the civil war, his relationship with his wives, his temperament as a manager, his impoverished childhood--all of these subjects keep this book from falling into the realm of the dry theatre biography.

Born into a theatrical family in 1829, he made his debut as an infant in crowd scene. His work as an actor would end only with his death in 1905. In his lifetime, Jefferson was praised as an actor of comedy touched with pathos. Like Robin Williams of today, this sentimental side was embraced by some and rejected by others. In this biography, the praise and criticism co-exist with dynamic results.

Wisely, Bloom has found a way to balance the details of Jefferson's 76 years of life at a swift pace. His method is to present the narrative followed by a large appendix. The core of the book is 300 pages, but what follows is another 200 pages of footnotes and performance information. While the appendix is not needed to appreciate the book, it holds additional colorful stories and odd bits of information. Bloom's style is straight-forward, clear, and he supports his work with details. At times, the biography is even quite fresh and witty. In discussing Jefferson's All-Star production of "The Rivals" , Bloom quotes a letter from Jefferson: "We all lived in four cars which were provided for us and during the whole four weeks of the trip, I never heard a cross word". Bloom responds: "If Jefferson never heard a cross word among ten star actors living together for four weeks in a railway train, it is probably because he was going deaf'. Bloom then provides evidence that there was much unhappiness on that tour.

Another strength of the book is the description of Jefferson's acting style. As an artist, Jefferson was consistently praised for his natural style. He achieved humor without artifice. His work as a comic actor seems to shatter many stero-types about 19th century theatre. He was an innovator. There is no question of Jefferson's artistic ability, but even here Bloom does not take anything for granted. Using criticism, promptbooks, and recordings, he is able to communicate Jefferson's unique artistic accomplishment in a clear way, without becoming clinical. In his autobiography, Joseph Jefferson wrote with great eloquence about the craft of acting...communicating with great clarity and passion. Arthur Bloom proves to be Jefferson's equal in this area.

While the first quarter of the book moves slowly, the momentum picks up and the picture of Jefferson emerges with contradictions, frailties, strengths and more. His life spanned from the days when actors were denied burial in a church (Jefferson's view of religion is colored by this, another delightful contradiction), to the days when, at the end of his life, successful actors had risen to be honored men in society. By focusing closely on the life of Jefferson, Bloom indirectly captures the evolution of theatre in America.

Although one wishes for more information on the relationship between Edwin Booth and Jefferson, and for more details about Jefferson's relationship with his children, it is difficult to fault the author. Jefferson's life was so long, and there is so much to cover that one is grateful for the amount of compelling detail Bloom is able to present. This biography will stand as a cornerstone for future works on Joseph Jefferson and the American Theatre. "Joseph Jefferson: The Dean of the American Theatre" is as innovative and compelling as its subject. Who could have imagined that the real life of Joseph Jefferson was more engaging than the story told in his autobiography?

This collection of lectures by the late Harvey Sacks will be useful and thought provoking for researchers and scholars in any of the social or human sciences. Sacks' wide-ranging intellect throws light on phenomena central to sociology, linguistics, anthropology, communication, and psychology. This volume is a comprehensive collection of Sacks' work, and a vital resource for social scientists

and Hands Across America comes a remarkable book. Life is indeed a contact sport, and Kragen shows anyone willing to follow the program how to make contact. Inspired by some housepainters in Des Moines who took him at his word when he said the same techniques that worked for Kenny Rogers would work for them, the secrets for surmounting seemingly impossible obstacles to success are laid out here in plain sight, plain language, ready for anyone who is ready to learn to succeed without massive change. I was fortunate enough to be invited to audit a class at UCLA where Kragen occasionally teaches this material, and to say it changed my life is an understatement.

This is an unabridged first edition published in Boston in 1874.
This is the first work about Jefferson and his times within the reach of the mass of readers.

Reading this book is like looking at a time capsule 128 years later... Wow, I was excited. The prose in this volume are different as the times between then and now, but it was worth the wait.

The book is solid and contains very interesting research, remembering that is was difficult to obtain what we have available at libraries today, back then a mere 48 years after Jefferson's death. I must say that this is one of the stepping stones of modern research for the writers today.

Those who like to read about the life Thomas Jefferson... do NOT miss this work by James Parton.

Enjoyable, knowledgeable, interesting and informative.

A good solid work.

This book prints every painting, drawing, or sculpture done of Jefferson when he was alive. All other portraits are derivative from these. Not even all the ones included in the book are truly originals, as nine are reproductions of originals that have been lost. Sixteen actual originals are included.

The portraits say almost as much about the artist as they do about Jefferson. Each reflects the unique style of the artist--for example, one done by Gilbert Stuart is very similar to a well-known portrait he did of Washington. The one by Stuart and several others are very romantic, presumably idealized, portraits. Others are far less flattering. Needless to say, the less flattering ones are less well known.

Perhaps the variation in the portraits also reflects the different sides of Jefferson, the "American Sphinx." Taken together, the originals give a sense of what Jefferson looked like, but none strikes me as the perfect portrait.

The book contains a very unflattering portrait of Washington. That one, as well as the several unflattering ones of Jefferson, make me wonder how accurate the better-known portraits of the Founding Fathers are.

Seeing the many different portraits of Jefferson, ones that flatter as well as ones that don't, help to give a sense of his being a flesh-and-blood human being and not just an icon.

This book has totally opened my eyes to a new relation between American literature and politics. I'm a grad student working on a dissertation on Emerson, and got hold of page proofs of this book because my advisor had them for review. This book argues that the whole notion of American lit as "a world elsewhere" -- as Richard Poirier called it: a world existing in language apart from politics and history -- lies in the relation between literature and politics during the years of Jefferson's presidency. The argument is immensely complex, but the bottom line is that there were two visions of America competing at around the time of 1800: the Federalist vision of America as an organic community based on civic virtue and mutual obligation, and the Jeffersonian vision based on radical French doctrines of equality, with a basis in radical individualism. Dowling's argument is that Jeffersonian radical individualism won, to the point that it has been our "national ideology" ever since. Not just the glorification of the "free" individual, but a market economy, consumerism, emphasis on consumption and "self-expression" through the market, and a mass democracy based on mass taste (TV, supermarkets, etc). The argument of the book is that Federalists, by the time Jefferson's second term had ended, knew that the vision of a "communitarian America" had vanished forever. So they moved the classical republic vision of the American republic into literature, where it became a mode of expression and moral witness. The process starts in Joseph Dennie's Port Folio magazine -- I never even knew it existed before I read this book -- but then continues through Irving, Thoreau, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Eliot Norton, Henry James, and Henry Adams (to name just a few in the tradition of what Dowling calls "literary Federalism." So American literature becomes "America in exile" -- a vision of America vanished from the realm of politics and taking up a new home inside language and the literary imagination. This is a really exciting book. After reading 200 books about gender and identity politics and "the postcolonial other" and similar exercises in empty trendiness, it hit me like a revelation. I've thrown out the whole earlier draft of my Emerson dissertation and am starting all over again.