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The Mind of Thomas Jefferson * Peter S. Onuf * Charlottesville: Univer-sity of Virginia Press, 2007 * x, 282 pp. * $49.50 cloth; $19.50 paper
Thomas Jefferson: Draftsman of a Nation * Natalie S. Bober * Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007 * xvi, 360 pp. * $22.95
Most scholars and popular writers who address the subject of Thomas Jefferson have pinned to their lapels a metaphorical campaign badge for or against him. Such sidechoosing hampers calm attempts to understand Jefferson, and recent historians (including the present writer) have argued for setting this habit aside. The books under review offer hope not only that the prevailing interpretation of Jefferson is evolving in the direction we need but also that scholars' efforts to achieve that goal are percolating beyond the borders of academia.
Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia, is a central figure in modern Jeffersonian scholarship. Onuf, a refreshingly iconoclastic scholar and teacher despite his resounding title, has worked with vigor and collegiality to foster new investigations of Jefferson's life and work, and he has set a high standard with his own writings. In 2000 his collection of essays, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood, situated Jefferson in his time and in the process undermined simplistic attempts to make him a modern American saint or the devil of the nation's past. The Mind of Thomas Jefferson complements Jefferson's Empire and extends the careful, historically nuanced, and subtle interpretative enterprise he launched in his earlier book.
The Mind of Thomas Jefferson is so rich and dense that a brief review...