Peterson's book captures snapshots of how Americans have viewed Thomas Jefferson throughout our history. On July 4, 1826, Thomas Jefferson died, and this is where the Jefferson image begins to take shape. The thesis concerns "the composite representation of the historic personage and of the ideas and ideals, policies and sentiments, habitually identified with him" (Preface). We watch how his image is refashioned and molded by various politicians over the course of one hundred and fifty years that this book covers. We are led by a great historian who has written eight books on Thomas Jefferson. It is a stimulating, whirlwind journey. The intellectual beginnings of the strains about slavery start with the Jefferson image. Ambiguity seems to sum up his points in his writings. It became possible for abolitionists to point to the Declaration of Independence and his comments on the Missouri Compromise, "it was like a fire-bell in the night" sounding "the knell of the Union" (189). The pro-slavery side could use Jefferson's and Madison's Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions of 1798 and cloak the issue as states' rights. To make this jump, however, the states' rights supporters had to change the interpretation of nullification from a consortium of states to a single state. These issues made for a gigantic loggerhead that would only be solved by a Civil War. Peterson shows us with great clarity how both sides claimed they were the true heirs of the Jefferson mind. Alleged sexual relations of a president are not only in twentieth century politics. Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemings is described and refuted by the author. Peterson pulls out three possible roots for these "rumors." They are all very interesting arguments; however, it has been proven true by DNA tests. Abraham Lincoln shines in this account as the person capable of synthesizing the conflicting ideas of Jefferson into one whole. I would argue that it is Lincoln's portrayal of Jefferson that we all have come to accept as our standard. Lincoln combined "the work of Alexander Hamilton, on the basis of the principles of Jefferson; and thus united...the two strands of political philosophy..." (220). This was Lincoln's genius as a leader, to bring a powerful government together with the ideals of the Declaration. This has made the image of Jefferson and Lincoln interconnected in the American mind. Jefferson falls into disrepute after the Civil War because of his intellectual dilemmas that helped shape it; consequently, there was a resurgence of popularity of the Federalists and particularly of Hamilton, Jefferson's nemesis. The twentieth century ushers in a new era over the Jefferson image. Differing policies and presidents resurrect Jefferson in the Progressive movement, the Wilsonian New Freedom, and Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism (331). This leads us to the same conflicts that Hamilton and Jefferson had, especially concerning the role of the federal government. It is, however, a changing country that will soon no longer be the agrarian dream that Jefferson would have liked. The U.S. had become an industrial and political powerhouse in the world, and there was no going back. The image changes to fit the times as the New Deal comes. Franklin D. Roosevelt uses Jefferson to provide a symbol to rally around, but it also seriously undermines and revises Jefferson's ideals. A big government program like the New Deal would not have been a priority according to strict Jeffersonian principles. Peterson writes that the Jefferson Memorial which was built in 1943 during FDR's administration "testifies to the artistry with which the New Deal combined reverence for the symbol and freedom of revision" (333). The book concludes in 1943 with the completion of the Jefferson Memorial and his birthday centennial. What are we left with at the end? We can quote a variety of different aspects to the Jeffersonian image depending on whose interpretation you prefer. You can quote Jefferson, "the anti-statist, states' righter, isolationist, agrarian, rationalist, civil libertarian, and constitutional democrat" (445). This division of the mind of the Sage of Monticello has created a boon for historians and politicians. We can all find something about Jefferson to argue and point to as a support for our position. Peterson has written a wonderful guide book though American thought on a very enigmatic figure in our history. Occasionally, the book gets bogged down in little details. It mostly provides extremely clear arguments concerning the historical disputes over who is the heir to the Jeffersonian image. Merrill Peterson has made an important contribution to the interpretation of a complex American figure. After consulting recent bibliographies, no one has written a similar work. Only the author himself could have improved on this book. The book has been republished and it currently available.

My version of this coin book for nickels (circa 1968) was so badly worn that I couldn't open it without the coins falling out. This makes a great gift for your children. Have them look through the coins in their piggy banks and keep the best. Then take the rest to the bank and ask to exchange them for new rolls of coins. (Be sure to ask the bank for some paper coin wrappers for your next trip back.) It is exciting for the kids to get a new roll to go through each week.

Robert Healy's "Jefferson on Religion in Public Education" is a great read. Healy traces Jefferson's philosophy regarding education from his early days as a member of the Virginia Legislature to his creation of the University of Virginia near the end of his life. Healy relates Jefferson's thought on the importance of education to a free society and how only an educated populace can live free.

Healy tackles the divisive world of religion and public education by deliniating Jefferson's views. Jefferson did believe religion was compatable with education, but he did not believe education should be dominated by sectarian bigots. Jefferson eliminated religious teaching from the elementary school curriculum thinking children too young for such complex issues as religious dogma and tenets.

Jefferson was hostile not to religious belief, he himself believed in God, but was hostile to fanatical religious views which had inflicted hatred and fanaticism on the world. He believed school was for teaching the "illuminating" of the human mind, not indoctrinating with sectarian belief.

Mr Healy's book is a comprehensive study and worth the purchase.

This book, although geared toward an adolescent audience, provided me not only with an excellent background in to Jefferson's life and decisons, but also addressed issues about his presidency which is rarely found in any book for young adults. The language of the book is pithy and clear, and hence appropriate for any age group. My Grandmother adores the series, after reading any of the books she feels as though she has really learned something. Also, the books themselves are very attractive.

This text provides an introductory insight into the life of an eighteenth century American. Risjord combines detailed comment with a listing of relevant sources. It is an excellent springboard for further study and has been of infinite use in my studies. It is well-structured, adopts an elementary tone and is easy to use. It is different from other texts in that it encompasses the revolutionary era, birth of the constitution and ascendancy of Jeffersonian Republicanism. Even for those not studying the era it is a good read.

Peter S. Onuf's book, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, is actually a collection of five essay that, as he says in his introduction, were prepared for different conferences at different times and places. His book is a scholarly coherent and original whole that revolves around two major themes of Jefferson's ideas of empire and nation and their relationship to each other. This is not a biographic narrative, but Onuf's argument that Jefferson believed the American Revolution was the first, powerful step toward a world empire of independent, republics bound together in a union of mutual affection and support. First, the establishment of independent republics forming an expanding union, essential to republicanism, on the American continent. The European continent would follow, and finally a worldwide union of free and independent states, bound together in mutual admiration, aid and affection.

Thomas Jefferson's ideal of revolution, that he called the "Spirit of 1776" would become the "Spirit of Everyman." Onuf argues in his introduction that Jefferson's vision of an empire of liberty would not reflect the corruption Jefferson attributed to the British Empire, and the more enlightened people of Europe would embrace this new way of political rule and life. Jefferson's empire would be made up of independent self-ruling people. The American Revolution would transform the world!

In Onuf's first chapter, "We shall all be Americans," Thomas Jefferson was referring to the American Indians, whom he idealized as natural republicans when they were in their "natural state" and uncorrupted by the British. Jefferson accused the British of being guilty of misguiding and misleading the natives in their mutual quest to fight and overcome the American colonists. In his second chapter, titled Republican Empire, Onuf's illustrates his argument that Thomas Jefferson's vision of an "American Empire" is founded in his experience of the American Revolution. Jefferson believed that a republican empire that avoided a central metropolitan power would be less self-serving, less onerously oppressive and less threatening to liberty. Onuf states, "Banishing metropolitan power from the New World, Jefferson imagined a great nation, a dynamic and expansive union of free peoples."

For Jeffersonians, the "Spirit of 1776" evoked both the Revolutionaries vaulting ambition to inaugurate a new world order and the desperate measures that they had been driven to by the collapse of the old imperial order. This was, as Onuf explains, the same old imperial order that Jefferson as a younger man had embraced and hoped to emulate in his public and private life. In Onuf's third chapter, "The Revolution of 1800," he illustrates the time and feeling of the era of a major sea change from the Federalist government, to Jefferson's principles founded in his proclaimed "Spirit of 1776."

Illustrating our Third President's reasoning Onuf quotes Jefferson, "The revolution of 1800 was as real a revolution in the principle of our government as that of 1776 was in its form; not effected indeed by the sword, as that, but by the rational and peaceable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people. The nation declared its will by dismissing functionaries of one principle, and electing those of another, in the two branches, executive and legislature, submitted to their election."

Onuf goes on to explain that even Jefferson himself could not have fully grasped what becoming a people of revolution meant in 1776. Their national identity, states Onuf, did not begin to clarify until the revolution of 1800. Onuf explains that the crisis of the 1790s, with the limitations being placed on civil liberties had 'roused the people from their slumbers' with the result that the people began to become conscious of themselves as a nation. According to Onuf, the transformation of Madisonian pessimism into Jeffersonian optimism constituted a crucial epoch in American political history.

In chapter four, "Federal Union," Onuf shows that Jefferson could not, even in retirement, stay uninvolved in national politics. Missouri was to be admitted as a state that would not allow slavery, a "free state" of the union. The controversy heated up as people chose sides to debate the admission of a state that would be required to ban slavery. Thomas Jefferson characterized the controversy as "a fire-bell in the night." The "Spirit of 1776" itself was under attack. To Jefferson, the eventual Missouri Compromise was not a compromise, but a grievous wound to the union that he feared would never heal.

In his fifth chapter, "To Declare Them a Free and Independent People," Onuf takes up the most difficult part of understanding Thomas Jefferson. Onuf illustrates Jefferson's attitude toward slaves by quoting from Jefferson's autobiography. "Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people are to be free." In spite of the fact that Jefferson himself was a slave owner, he expressed his belief that everyone should be free. Concerning slavery, in his Notes On the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote the prophetic and unforgettable words; "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

Throughout this fascinating work, Onuf demonstrates that Thomas Jefferson is all too human. In spite of Thomas Jefferson's great contributions as one of our founding fathers and his ideals of freedom and the revolutionary "Spirit of 1776," he is not just an American icon. He is a man, of human contradictions, faults and greatnesses. His relationships with the American Indians and his slaves show his human faults, as well as his humanity.

Onuf shows that we are indebted to Thomas Jefferson for much of our common language of American Nationhood. As the leading Jefferson scholar, Onuf does not disappoint the advanced reader in this well-reasoned, scholarly work. It should be read, studied, enjoyed, shared, debated and on the bookshelf of anyone seriously interested in the history of Thomas Jefferson and the American Nation.

«I have ever judged of the religion of others by their lives» - Thomas Jefferson.

Thomas Jefferson was a private man, and nowhere more so than in religious matters. A believer in the «eternal divorce» of religious opinion from civil authority, he was just as wary of the curtailment of individual freedom of conscience by the tyranny of public pressure, castigating the tyrants with clean hands who «altho' the laws will no longer permit them... to burn those who are not exactly of their Creed, ... raise the Hue and cry of Heresy against them, place them under the ban of public opinion, and shut them out from all the kind affections of society.» Afraid of any undue influence on other people's opinions, and jealous of any interference with his own much abused tranquility and reputation, this man who was «in a sect of my own» refrained till the end of his life from any public disclosure of his beliefs in divine matters.

However, his silence did not extend to those among his closer friends whom he suspected to be receptive to his unorthodox opinions, and in addition to his correspondence with them, time -seconded by the efforts of the editors of the present volume- has preserved for us two remarkably revealing documents : «The Philosophy of Jesus», which he composed in 1804, and «The Life and Morals of Jesus», which produced about fifteen years later.

These two pamphlets, the former in English, and the latter in four languages (Greek, Latin, French and English), evince Jefferson's enduring dedication to what he believed to be the restoration of Christ's authentic life and message. Their method of composition, matured after reading and rereading Joseph Priestley's radical, Unitarian treatises on the subject (such as his *History of the Corruptions of Christianity* and his *History of the Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ*), was simply to rewrite the Gospels by cutting out anything smacking of the «idolatry and superstition» of the «vulgar», any reference to the supernatural or to Jesus's divinity, and retaining only the «diamonds» that were his sermons and parables.

These two pamphlets tell the story of a child, born to a Jewish couple, who grows up in wisdom, preaches for a short while a reformed (one is almost tempted to say «Enlightened») version of the wicked faith and morality of his people, and is put to death by the civil and religious authorities, a martyr of the unholy alliance of church and state. This man never rose from the dead nor performed any miracles whatsoever, and if he ever claimed to be divinely inspired, the error was excusable : «Elevated by the enthusiasm of a warm and pure heart , conscious of the high strains of an eloquence which had not been taught to him, he might readily mistake the coruscations of his own fine genius for inspirations of a higher order.»

Jefferson deeply regretted his revered Jewish reformer died «at about 33, his reason having not yet attained the maximum of it's energy», but he nonetheless considered the system of morality he had begun to develop to be «the most benevolent and sublime that has been ever taught ; and eminently more perfect than those of any of the antient philosophers». He saw in this system the ultimate guarantee of the one value that seemed to matter to him above all others : social «utility» or harmony, the state of generalized peace and goodwill which is achieved when men refrain from initiating force against each other and love each other as Jesus loved them. And he saw in it too, the one common denominator in all the preachings of the myriad Christian sects, the one hope of their ultimate reconciliation and of an end to centuries of religious wars and persecutions : for only dogma, that crazed concoction of corrupt, «overlearned professors» and priests, divided them.

But *Jefferson's Extracts From the Gospels* contains much more than reproductions of his heretic selections from the Evangelists. It also includes a highly competent and sensible introduction to Jefferson's religious evolution, from the influence of Bolingbroke to that of Priestley; and, perhaps my favorite section of the volume, a one-hundred-page collection of letters written by or to Jefferson from 1800 to 1825, and revealing his opinion of Plato («a Graecian sophist... dealing out mysticisms incomprehensible to the human mind»), Epicurus (whose doctrines «contain everything rational in moral philosophy which Greece and Rome have left us») and Calvin («a madman... on whom reasoning was wasted. The strait jacket alone was [his] proper remedy») ; of the Quakers (whom we should all imitate, opting to «live without an order of priests, moralise for ourselves, follow the oracle of conscience, and say nothing about what no man can understand nor therefore believe») and the Unitarians (whose «advances towards rational Christianity» would soon convert the whole nation) ; of the Apocalypse («the ravings of a maniac») and the «incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic, that three are one, and one is three.»

I would not recommend this book to anyone seeking answers to the ultimate questions, but if all you want to know is what Jefferson believed in, I cannot imagine a better source.

Jefferson's Memorandum Books are a marvel in themselves, but even more so with the editing work of Bear and Stanton. The Memorandum Books are transcribed to offer the reader Jefferson's records on money spent travelling from DC back to Monticello (p. 1094), the efficiency of one- vs. two-wheeled wheelbarrows (p. 282), or his early legal notations. But what makes this work invluable is the wealth of information that the editors have packed into the footnotes about everything from Jefferson's personal relationships at the time of an entry, to the location of a road or river he mentions, to whatever can be known about a slave paid for running an errand. To make the 1419 page (with footnotes) Jefferson document usable, the editors constructed a 203 page index to make the Memorandum Books as useful a tool as they could be. The scholarly apparatus here makes this publication a source for historians of just about anything, from the local to the national economy, slave life at Monticello and Virginia, the environment, and, of course, Thomas Jefferson. The only problem with the books is the price tag, which will inhibit many who don't have institutional support for their research tools.

Martin Larson's "Jefferson: Magnificent Populist" is an outstanding compelation of the views and philosophies of Thomas Jefferson. Larson provides interesting and helpful commntary at the beginning of each new chapter giving a synopsis of Jefferson's philosophy in each area. Jefferson is truly allowed to speak for himself instead of a new historian or author "interpreting" him. His views on education, slavery, freedom, Alexander Hamilton, liberty,and the American Revolution are all there. Larson truly brings out Jefferson's greatness by allowing this champion of human liberty to tell it like it is- from his own words. Great volume for a Jefferson collection or general read.

This volume is a welcome addition to the various editions of Jefferson's writings available. Although many of the selections may be found in the Library of America edition, this work conveniently arranges them topically. In addition, there are many pieces *not* available anywhere else. Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the work is the large and informative list of short biographies in front. The only real drawback I can see is the exclusion of some important documents, most notably his draft of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798. But on the whole, it's great, and it should appeal to most serious Jeffersonians.