Thomas Jefferson (Childhood of the Presidents)

Ferry, Joseph

ISBN 10: 1590842715 ISBN 13: 9781590842713

Publisher: Mason Crest

Synopsis

Focuses on the formative years of one of the key figures in American history, Thomas Jefferson, 3rd president of the US. This book details the foundations for Jefferson's many later accomplishments - as an author, inventor, self-taught architect, diplomat, political philosopher, and politician - that were laid during his youth in Virginia.

About this title

About the Author:

Joyce Appleby is professor of history at UCLA. Specializing in the study of early America, she is the author of Inheriting the Revolution. She lives in Los Angeles.

From Publishers Weekly:

Thomas Jefferson, so multifaceted and long-lived, tries the skills of most who venture to write his biography, especially a short one like this. But UCLA historian Appleby (Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans) has succeeded in writing as good a brief study of this complex man as is imaginable. Another in a series on the American chief executives edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., her elegant book is a liberal's take on the complex, sphinxlike founder of American liberalism. Appleby convincingly argues that the third president's greatest legacies were limited government (breached, however, by the opportunism that characterized his own presidency) and the great expansion of democracy. If some of her criticisms of Jefferson seem more perfunctory than heartfelt, she fully explains the man's sorry record and tortured views on slavery and race. Providing along the way a short, up-to-date history of the early 19th-century nation, she also concisely surveys the day's great issues-voting, democracy, political parties, commerce, westering and religion. Yet such a balanced picture of Jefferson remains somehow unsatisfactory, no doubt because a man of so many contradictions slips away from every biographer, the tensions in the man mirroring those of his times. Appleby tries to toss a bouquet to the man who vanquished the Federalist Party and purchased the Louisiana Territory. She wants to convince us that Jefferson was "one of history's most intuitive politicians," but even in Appleby's capable hands, Jefferson remains the most unfathomable political figure in our history.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mason Crest
• ISBN 10: 1590842715
• ISBN 13: 9781590842713
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 47