Thomas Jefferson Travels: Selected Writings, 1784-1789 - Softcover

Brandt, Anthony

3.79

24 ratings by Goodreads

9781426200588: Thomas Jefferson Travels: Selected Writings, 1784-1789

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1426200587 ISBN 13: 9781426200588

Publisher: National Geographic, 2007

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Eloquent and powerful, Thomas Jefferson’s letters and travel diaries from his years abroad as the U.S. minister to France spill onto the pages of this volume in wonderful detail, covering the full range of his interests and passions.

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Review:

"Anthony Brandt...has shrewdly edited Jefferson's astonishing correspondence...into a compelling encounter with the mind of a great man." -Los Angeles Times
"Here, in the trees, butterflies and beggars of his journal, I...sense a real-life Jefferson... This book is important." -Times (London)

Synopsis:

Drawn from Thomas Jefferson's voluminous correspondence, notes, and travel journals, this volume celebrates Jefferson's residence and travels in Europe in the years 1784 to 1789, offering important insights into yet another dimension of one of the most compelling figures in American history. Through his observations of European art, architecture, and customs, his friendships with various members of the French nobility, his political insights, his intimate correspondence with friends and family, he is at turns brilliant, kind, thoughtful, patient, astute, enthusiastic, wrong-headed, and not entirely honest - in short, quintessentially human. But always dignified. Once you have read these pages and gotten to know him better, you will find it impossible not to like him. So complex a man as Jefferson could not help but contradict himself. He counted those great champions of liberty the Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Paine among his most intimate friends, but he was quite capable of maintaining friendly relations with the King's most trusted ministers as well.

He came to feel at home in the salons and gardens and on the avenues of Paris, yet he wrote long letters to his friends in America criticizing the mores of French high society. A moral man, he nevertheless fell passionately in love with a married woman artist and wrote long flirtatious letters to other married women. Jefferson takes us along on his trips to southern France and Italy and then through Holland and Germany, eager to see "those things I have never seen before, and will never see again." He is one of the most businesslike and thorough of all American travelers to Europe, determined not to miss anything, always curious, always thinking. The writings in this volume cover a range of subjects that includes the education of young men and women, various strains of rice, the building of the Virginia State Capitol, wine grapes and their cultivation, the Constitution of the United States, how to travel in Europe, the French Revolution, French marriages, American diplomacy, European politics, free trade, all in that extraordinary prose style of his, surely the most graceful, and at the same time most powerful, of any American politician of his standing.

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