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New condition dark blue cloth boards with gold spine lettering within a black and gold block border, contained in a new condition non price-clipped color illustrated dust jacket. Includes Chronology; Note on the Texts; Notes and Index. Illustrated with two-color front and rear endpaper decorations. Also includes a bound-into-the-volume matching blue satin ribbon page marker. "This is the most comprehensive selection ever published of the writings of our third president and foremost spokesman for democracy. Jefferson, a brilliant political thinker, is perhaps best known for the Declaration of Independence, but he was a man of extraordinarily wide interests. Here along with his public papers are pieces on science, archaeology, architecture, gardening, and literature; travel journals; first-hand accounts of the French Revolution; fascinating descriptions of life in early America, including the complete Notes on the State of Virginia; and more than 250 brilliant and urbane letters to such men as Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Lafayette, Madison, and John Adams. For a renewed sense of the possibility that the United States represented to its founders, this is a remarkable and indispensable book. "Gives the reader a chance to assess the power of the man's pen and, by this standard, his character and mind." - The New York Times, from the rear outer jacket. "Third President of the United States, author of the Declaration of Independence, spokesman for democracy and the republic, Thomas Jefferson had an extraordinry variety of speculative interest. These are now fully represented in the most comprehensive testimony to his greatness ever to appear in a single volume. He was exceptionally controversial in his own time, and many of his ideas remain the subject of national debate. In his arguments for a system of general education, for local rather than central authority, for caution in international affairs, for religious and intellectual freedom, and for economic and social justice, Jefferson defined, at the moment of the nation's formation, the issues that still direct our political life. This volume, with its broad selection of texts spanning Jefferson's long career, will give the reader the opportunity to reassess one of our most influential presidents. His "First Inaugural Address" is a resounding statement of faith in a democracy of enlightened people. His Notes on the State of Virginia, and his letters to political allies, scientific colleagues, family members, and friends, are an invaluable record of the landscape, inhabitants, life, and daily customs of America in the Revolutionary and early national eras. They also, at times, become fervent and witty rejoinders to European misrepresentations of the American scene. Extensively read (his library of 10,000 volumes became the foundation of the Library of Congress) and widely traveled (as American minister in Paris at the time of the French Revolution he reported its events with informed sympathy), Jefferson wrote with ease and spontaneity about architecture (he helped plan the nation's capital), gardening, religion, literature, botany, education (he founded the University of Virginia), the habits of his fellow citizens, and, of course, his beloved Monticello. Jefferson's prose has an energy, clarity, and charming off-handedness, consistent with his conviction that style in writing should impose no barrier between the most educated and the most common reader. For those who want a renewed sense of the opportunity for human freedom that the United States represented to its founders, this is an indispensable book." - from the inner front and rear jacket flaps.
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