This is the first in a two-part series of conversations recorded at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello as History As It Happens goes on location, with special guests historian Alan Taylor and Brandon Dillard, Monticello’s director of historic interpretation and audience engagement. Hear part two here. Last fall the podcast visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon.
Thomas Jefferson wrote the most famous, inspiring words in all of American history: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
From the moment the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence, Americans have been in a perpetual state of argument over its meaning. Democracy for whom? Freedom and equality for whom? No founding father better articulated the ideals or personified the paradox of the American Revolution. In this episode, Alan Taylor and Brandon Dillard discuss why Jefferson still matters, from his views on the nature of democracy to whether White and Black people might one day live together as equals.
“The United States is an invented country. It’s less than three centuries old. We don’t have the option to go back to mythic times in order to find some mythic origin for ‘the people’ defined in some ethnic or racial terms,” said Mr. Taylor, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation chair at the University of Virginia and two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. “We’re a mixed group of peoples and we are defined by a cluster of ideas, and those ideas largely originate with the group we call the Founders.”
In this episode of History As It Happens, Mr. Taylor and Mr. Dillard discuss Jefferson’s vision for the flowering of democracy; the place of Black people in the body politic upon obtaining their freedom from enslavement; religious freedom; and human progress.
SEE ALSO: ‘History Wars’: A visit to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
History As It Happens is available at washingtontimes.com or wherever you find your podcasts.
