At an Oval Office reception honouring all living US Nobel laureates President John F. Kennedy joked, ‘there hasn’t been so much talent assembled in this room since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.’ Jefferson stands out, even in an age of polymaths, both for the breadth of his interests and for his influence on American history. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and served as America’s minister to France during the initial stages of the French revolution. Breaking with Washington, he helped create partisan politics in America before serving as the third president of the United States. By concluding the Louisiana Purchase and authorizing the Lewis Clark expedition Jefferson established the United States as a nation with continental aspirations. His actions in respect of the Haitian revolution and the Napoleonic wars, coupled with his Anglophobia, situated America within the wider world. Following the deaths of Franklin and Washington, Jefferson was to all intents and purposes the embodiment of the Founding Fathers and the recipient and originator of a vast correspondence on American government, science and culture. In retirement as in office he helped define the new nation.

This course uses Jefferson’s life and writings to pose a number of questions about the age in which he lived. For example, what was the impress of the Enlightenment on the conduct of government and intellectual enquiry during this period? Was Jefferson’s obnoxious racism and hostility to the abolition of slavery sui generis or widely held? What were the origins and influence of ‘Jeffersonian’ theories of democracy? How far were men in Jefferson’s position able to embrace ‘the age of the common man?’ What value should historians place on intellectual or political consistency? To what extent is America an exceptional nation?