Tag: Thomas Jefferson

Source Highlights, Special Features

Implementing the Louisiana Purchase – Jacob F. Lee

Being surprised is one of the great pleasures of historical research. As little as a passing reference in a single document can spark new understandings of a person, event, or era. In 2019, I began research on a book project about the long aftermath of the Louisiana Purchase and the United States’ century-long project of colonizing the vast lands it had ostensibly acquired from France in 1803. Early on, I…

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Special Features, Teaching EAS

Teaching EAS: One Day in the Classroom – The French Revolution in America and the Reinvention of Revolution – Anna Vincenzi

It was only in the early 1790s that Thomas Jefferson began trumpeting his authorship of the Declaration of Independence. Throughout the late 1770s and the 1780s, Americans essentially forgot the Declaration, and no one seemed to remember who had written it. But in the 1790s they started attributing new meanings to the document, making it into a metaphysical, almost sacred text. Jefferson’s fellow Republicans started celebrating him as the “immortal”…

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