00:03:31.040Like Monticello is one of the most people have heard about, I would think.
00:03:34.440I think arguably the most iconic presidential home.
00:03:39.460We're the only presidential home in the United States that's a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
00:03:44.360We share that designation with the University of Virginia's Rotunda, which is also a Jefferson-designed building.
00:03:53.300And then the currency where Roosevelt, who is a big fan of Jefferson, puts Monticello on the back of the nickel, sort of cements it in a mind's eye view.
00:04:05.260But, yeah, it's one of the most famous buildings in the United States, you know, created by a statesman who was also an architect.
00:04:15.620So I wanted to talk to you about just your work.
00:04:18.820I mean, not that you've been there for that long.
00:04:21.260You've been there for long enough, but I mean, this is before your time, I think, or correct me if I'm wrong, that the Monticello tours and things started actively engaging with the history of enslavement on the site.
00:04:32.720So Monticello has never not recognized enslavement, right? It was a place that people of African descent predominated by as much as 10 or 12 to 1 over people of European descent in Jefferson's day.
00:04:47.900So that would have been visible and part of a plantation expectation for anybody who visited there.
00:04:55.900It was remembered as a place of slavery after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation was created in 1923.
00:05:05.600And by the middle of the 20th century, archaeological excavations had begun to document the material history of slavery and the lives of enslaved people.
00:05:17.900But it wasn't until the late 1980s or early 1990s that the history of people enslaved on the mountaintop entered public tours.
00:05:27.760The creation of the Getting Word African-American History Project, African-American Oral History Project in 93 is a kind of good marker of seeking to braid the stories of Jefferson with the stories of the bondsmen and women who made his life possible.
00:05:47.900So through the 90s, the braiding of the interpretation of Jefferson's biography with the world building that made his biography possible increased.
00:06:00.840Um, uh, in the 2010s, we excavated and reinterpreted the dependency wings of Monticello, which is where all of the cooking and, uh, and, um, other, you know, wine storage and, and beer provisioning, et cetera, for the house were done where some enslaved people lived.
00:06:22.340and also reinterpreted Mulberry Row, which was the main artisanal street of the plantation.
00:06:30.160That mountaintop project, as it was called, was completed in 2018.
00:06:35.780So as it was in Jefferson's lifetime, Monticello as a site that's interpreted for a public
00:06:42.700has continued to evolve and continued to be a laboratory of historical practice
00:06:48.960and the understanding of constitutional democracy.
00:06:53.560I started in this role in January of 24.
00:06:57.240So that work was done by my predecessor
00:07:02.160It's been a commitment of the whole foundation
00:07:04.480for a long time to follow Jefferson's dictum
00:07:08.120that we pursue the truth wherever it might lead.
00:07:12.580And in excavating, interpreting the lives of enslaved people
00:07:18.180on the property, we bring it closer to the way that Jefferson and his legal family experienced
00:07:25.880it from the 1770s until his death in 1826. Just in terms of what's going on, well, I guess it's
00:07:34.520been going on for a decade or more, just other former plantations that are now wedding venues
00:07:40.640and things like that, I think have been bumping up against trying, you were describing it as
00:07:45.400braiding the history. And I think that's such a good way to describe it. Other places that haven't
00:07:49.740done that, I think have just been bumped up against, like if you've been places that haven't
00:07:54.060engaged with that part of their history, it's just impossible to not engage with that at this point.
00:07:59.120So I think the fact that Monticello was always, it sounds like that's always been an important part
00:08:04.040of the site itself, which increasing importance more recently, but have other locations come to
00:08:11.080you to ask for advice on how to engage with this side of their history? I'm just curious because
00:08:16.940it seems like just Monticello was one of the first to really actively do this. So we're part
00:08:22.720of a number of networks sharing interpretive practice lessons and our own journey of continual
00:08:31.640learning. And I think we were indeed, and here I'm bragging on my predecessors rather than myself,
00:08:37.880we were indeed on the cutting edge of this act, not of revisionism, but of recovery, right? It's
00:08:45.640the recovery of the world that Jefferson inherited, modified, and knew throughout his whole life.
00:08:55.660I think Monticello has a special obligation here over and against all of the sites in the United
00:09:02.720States that had the history of transatlantic slavery in their substrate, which would include
00:09:09.000every site in the Southeast, but also all of those sites in the Mid-Atlantic and New England
00:09:16.440that profited from enslavement offshore. Monticello is the only one whose patriarch
00:09:24.960wrote the Declaration of Independence. So we are really at the knife's edge of the paradox
00:09:32.940of the early American founding, where the foremost philosopher of liberty on the Western
00:09:39.020side of the Atlantic, who wrote perhaps the most famous and important sentence in the English
00:09:45.740language, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men were created equal, was also himself
00:09:51.460an enslaver and knew that slavery was wrong and wrote about that his entire adult life.
00:09:58.240So in order to understand our world, I think you need to understand Jefferson. And it's that
00:10:04.240sort of triple layer paradox, not only writing about liberty and practicing chattel slavery,
00:10:12.320but also knowing what he was doing was wrong, that makes him such a rich figure to think with,
00:10:19.880Right. We all participate in systems that we inherited, global systems.
00:10:25.580Right. And we might think in our day of how impossible it would be to disentangle oneself from greenhouse gas emission for a year or even something more modest than that from not using plastic for a year.
00:10:42.820Right. I'm looking at your your beautiful home full of wood, but also your your AirPods.
00:10:49.880So we all live inside global systems that were not of our making and that the disentangling
00:10:59.860That's how Jefferson found himself in the system of slavery, which he did not create.
00:11:05.300He stepped outside it enough to do two things.
00:11:09.400One was to write the Declaration of Independence, having imbibed Locke and George Mason and
00:11:16.820all the other Rousseau and Montaigne and all the other freedom thinkers who went into his
00:11:23.620imagination of an egalitarian pre-political world, stepped outside enough to do that,
00:11:30.480to found a country based on that logic and to write searing critiques of slavery, including
00:11:38.400in the draft version of the declaration that Congress excised that long paragraph from.
00:11:45.300But he didn't step outside it enough fundamentally to change it during his lifetime. And, you know, saw himself not only as holding other people in bondage, but as himself being in bondage to the institution of slavery, his famous metaphor of holding the wolf by the ears.
00:12:06.380You know, you cannot make peace with it and you cannot let it go. In those ways, I think he's a wonderful illustration of what it means to appreciate the predicaments of history. We all live in the predicaments of history. And I think there are a few people in the American past who illustrate that so poignantly and profoundly as Jefferson's life and legacy does.
00:12:33.640Well, I mean, this brings us to a discussion of Sally Hemings, and I'm curious, how is she currently being commemorated or celebrated at Monticello?
00:12:44.480So Sally Hemings is one of the most famous people in the 18th and 19th century world now, thanks to the work of generations of descendants and scholars, but especially my former Harvard colleague, Annette Gordon-Reed.
00:13:03.660and for all that we think about and and with her we know remarkably little about her we don't know
00:13:13.840the date that she was born we don't know what she looked like except for a few recollections about
00:13:21.120her the color of her complexion and and her handsomeness we don't know how tall she was
00:13:28.300We know nothing of her interior life. And for these reasons, it's fitting that the exhibition that we have about her at Monticello, which is called The Life of Sally Hemings, and is in a small room in the South Wing dependencies below the house where she and members of her family may have lived.
00:13:51.600Um, she's represented as a, uh, as a, uh, wrapped mannequin, but without a, without a face, um, uh, reminding us what we cannot see.
00:14:02.920Um, uh, you know, we, we tell the story as, uh, generations of documentary evidence, um, from the time that, uh, that she and Jefferson were both alive.
00:14:16.320And through the reminiscence of her son, Madison, in the 1870s, another enslaved person in the house, Isaac Granger Jefferson, in the 1840s, we tell her story as it has come down to us, but we can't see her face or hear her voice.
00:14:36.380I think that's a useful reminder that the world of what we in the United States called Founding Fathers is crowded with people that we cannot see.
00:14:48.160I've been writing about this for some 250th anniversary essays. We think of 56 men in a room signing the Declaration of Independence as portrayed by Jonathan Trumbull sometime after the fact.
00:15:06.920And it's much harder to see the throngs of faces in the streets and in their households. And Sally Hemings is one of those who touched history in profound ways, whose shadow hung over Jefferson's entire political career, whose children were his children, but who we really can't put ourselves in the shoes or in the headspace of without resorting to fiction.
00:15:37.500I think that's a really astute choice to celebrate her without putting up a portrait of maybe she looked like this.
00:15:45.540Or to guess, or to even just to have somebody representing her, but just to say, we don't know, but here's the importance of her.
00:15:51.160It gives her a different sort of power in a different way, because if there was a portrait, everybody would just be like, oh, look, she's pretty, and you could kind of move on.
00:15:59.620But you're kind of emphasizing her importance by having so much other information about her.
00:16:05.680And wasn't there in the last couple of years a room that was discovered, like a secret Sally Hemings room in the house, the main house?
00:16:14.080The room that we think that she and some of her children may have lived in is in that south dependency of the house.
00:16:23.660There is a Hemings cabin that was occupied by her kin, John and Priscilla Hemings.
00:16:28.960And one of the things that I think is striking about that recreated cabin on Monticello's Mulberry Row is when you stand on the second floor of the house, on the east side of the house, where the nursery was, some of the children that Priscilla Hemings cared for, Jefferson's grandchildren, you can see the cabin out the window.
00:16:56.560These lives were very proximate to each other, very entangled with each other. Jefferson famously didn't believe on wasting space on staircases. So when you tour Monticello and take our behind the scenes tour, which takes you into the second and third floors of the house, you take the staircases that all of Jefferson's legal family and all of the enslaved people who attended them would have taken.
00:17:25.740and they're barely a foot wide, right? People would have brushed past each other all the time.
00:17:32.440So saying that Sally Hemings did not have a room in the house itself doesn't suggest that there's
00:17:38.920great distance between these people. You know, slavery was an intimate institution
00:17:44.420in all kinds of ways. So it's coming up on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration
00:17:51.820of independence. And what, you said that there was an earlier draft where Thomas Jefferson had
00:17:56.980written some more things, some more anti-slavery things, and those were taken out. So is that
00:18:01.720something you have at Monticello, like the drafts, the earlier drafts of this?
00:18:05.780We have facsimiles of the early drafts. There are about five copies, one at the Massachusetts
00:18:11.820Historical Society, one at the Library of Congress, one in the small special collections library of
00:18:18.500UVA. Jefferson kept copies of his own drafts and often shared them with people, shared them
00:18:25.660right after Congress adopted the format that we all know today, sending to a friend saying,
00:18:32.920you judge which one was better. He was very proud of his own draft and found the excisions
00:18:38.200painful. The largest excision, which I think was 167 words, would have been the 28th grievance
00:18:47.060blaming King George III for foisting the institution of chattel slavery on the colonies
00:18:54.780and pushing back against the attempts of colonial British Americans to end that noxious trade
00:19:05.280in men, as they put it. Interestingly, there's an intellectual historian at the University of
00:19:13.540Maryland, Holly Brewer, studying the Royal African Company, who argues that that allegation
00:19:19.520was actually substantially true, that through the monopolistic control of the Royal African
00:19:25.620Company, the Hanoverian dynasty and George III himself did prop up the transatlantic
00:19:33.420slave trade at a time when many planters were ready to be rid of it.
00:19:38.320Congress struck that entire paragraph. And one of the things that we study when we study the
00:19:45.860declaration is the compromises that were necessary to make the American Union. Compromise is something
00:19:52.740that we should always celebrate and critique at the same time. The colonies of British America,
00:20:00.520including the ones that became your country and the ones that became mine, were incredibly
00:20:05.540disparate places, 26 of them on the eve of the United States, 13 of which rebelled. And the
00:20:14.300price of holding that coalition of 13 together was a set of trade-offs. And the Carolinas and
00:20:24.340Georgia are believed to have insisted on the excision of that paragraph, which even Virginia,
00:20:30.280the largest slave-holding colony in the provincial world, was willing to stand behind.
00:20:37.540I did, a few months ago, we were doing a series of episodes on my podcast about the French0.62
00:20:42.800Revolution, and I do want to talk about Jefferson and Paris a little bit. But also, I just wanted
00:20:46.980to say what I'm noticing, or what I've noticed in the French Revolution and the way that it kind of
00:20:52.440fell apart, is that versus the American Revolution, I think the fact that they were able to make
00:20:59.100these compromises, this huge group of people, like when you think about that many people today,
00:21:03.520coming to consensus would be really challenging. But it does seem like the way that the American
00:21:08.680Revolution happened and it stuck in a way that the French Revolution did not seems to be just
00:21:13.560that the people involved, they found ways to all work together so that they could move forward with
00:21:18.920this strategy. And what do you think Thomas Jefferson's time in Paris, because it was such
00:21:25.560a similar time period with the struggles they were having and the struggles that were happening
00:21:29.460in America. What do you think that showed him? Or do you think that gave him ideas?
00:21:33.100I think Jefferson viewed himself as giving the French ideas, right? That French philosophy
00:21:40.560had meant an awful lot to him coming up in a rural provincial place, going to school in
00:21:49.500Williamsburg, Virginia, coming of age in Albemarle County in Western Virginia. This is really the
00:21:58.220frontier of the British colonial world. And yet he grew up in a house that was by the standards
00:22:05.020of its day filled with books, which is to say his father had about 200, a place that was rustic
00:22:11.500enough that a vast library was 200 books. And quite early in his life, he would have come into
00:22:18.400contact with the French ideas of liberty and equality that were formative to him as a thinker
00:22:26.980leading up to the Declaration of Independence and beyond. When he gets there in the 1780s,
00:22:35.900he's the emissary following Franklin of his new country abroad. And it is a kind of coming back
00:22:44.740to life for him after the death of his beloved wife, Martha, when he really retreats from the
00:22:52.740world for some time after losing her quite young after a sickness following childbirth.
00:22:59.640So he's dazzled by the opulence of what he sees. He writes about the foods and the wines and
00:23:09.060and the cultural mores. Interestingly, support for France comes to be one of the great
00:23:16.100dividing lines in early American politics, to look at Jefferson and Adams as a kind of shorthand,
00:23:24.080Adams believing that the United States should follow Britain in the model of a middling
00:23:31.360commercial republic, and Jefferson believing in the potentiality of a truly revolutionary state
00:23:40.340that is willing, as Payne said, to begin the world again. And of course, Jefferson and Payne
00:23:47.280are both allied in that belief that France will emerge as a sister republic. He leaves
00:23:56.020revolutionary France before it descends into terror, but he never really parts company with
00:24:03.140the French experiment and famously says the tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time
00:24:10.700with the blood of tyrants. So believes in a right of revolution, even to the kind of upheaval that
00:24:19.460he sees in France. There's a late letter between Jefferson and Adams where Adams is talking about
00:24:28.080what the government excesses are that each of them fears. And he says that, you know, Jefferson fears
00:24:36.160the one or fears the few, meaning fears monarchy or fears aristocracy, whereas Adams fears the mob.
00:24:45.800Jefferson really does believe in the potential of ordinary people, though, of course, when he was imagining the category of citizen, he wasn't thinking about women or free or enslaved black people.
00:25:03.920But to the extent that he defines and broadens the definition of the political people, he believes in youth. He believes that the better ideas are always coming down the road.
00:25:16.980A wonderful colleague of mine, a historian named Andrew Davenport, who heads Monticello's International Center for Jefferson Studies, talks about this inspiring belief in generations yet unborn, and that at the same time, that's kicking the can down the road on difficult issues.
00:25:39.920That's interesting. Yeah, it's kind of both things. Like on the one hand, I think that is,
00:25:43.920it's something that you see today, like with Gen Z and stuff, you know, like people who are getting
00:25:47.200so much more politically active than previous generations were, and how there's a division
00:25:51.840between kind of the old guard and the younger people. So it's like, it would be good if people
00:25:56.240could have could support the younger generation more, but also at the same time, you don't want
00:25:59.960to leave everything to them. So yeah, it's kind of both things. Yeah, I mean, and this, of course,
00:26:06.260was a an area of great concern in the young united states as they're thinking about the
00:26:15.880transmission of this polity you know unique in the history of the modern world right to have an
00:26:22.820extensive republic going back to greek and roman principles but spreading over hundreds and then
00:26:30.200thousands of miles. And they're all thinking, you know, from the time of the Confederation Congress
00:26:37.920through the Constitutional Convention and beyond, how do we pass this thing on? You know, the famous
00:26:44.760Franklin apocryphal phrase, which you probably didn't say, a republic, if you can keep it.
00:26:51.580So this question of how do you keep it? For Jefferson, a large part of that answer was investing in the young, right? His last great act of public service was founding the University of Virginia.
00:27:07.860And one of the principles behind that effort was that a form of self-government, a Republican form of self-government demands an educated citizenry, that it's a difficult form of political life to carry on our backs.
00:27:26.460Monarchy is very easy, right? All you have to do is salute the king. A republic is demanding. And in order to cultivate the knowledge, the virtue, the dispositions towards one's fellow people that is necessary to carry it forward, one of the things you need is citizen education.
00:27:47.820So they're thinking of this question of in the long, long relay race that is democratic life, how do you pass the baton?
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00:30:59.820That's such an interesting, and I haven't thought about that part of it. Just in my podcast, we looked at pre-revolution, the revolution itself, and then afterwards, I hadn't thought about how do you make sure it stays? How do you continue?
00:31:13.600I mean, I guess they benefited from the fact that people like Thomas Jefferson lived fairly long lives, so those people were still around to kind of help oversee things, but even just things like the university, like you said, yeah, just to make sure that the next generation of people aren't just going to undo everything you just did.
00:31:28.680That would be just as much work, if not more work, I would think.
00:31:32.500And I think it's interesting that you point to the longevity of some of the people who are capital F founders by the time of their death, right?
00:31:43.240You know, the country as a whole, its media ecology is aware of the aging of Jefferson and Adams and Charles Carroll of Maryland, who are among the last surviving signers, right?
00:31:57.180Jefferson and Adams famously dying on the same day on July 4th of 2026.
00:32:04.940So I think sage elders who people come to to seek wisdom is is one part of that answer.
00:32:14.480But I think a larger part is just the energy of masses of ordinary people who are far more
00:32:24.620literate than most of the societies of their day, and who read these founding documents and say,
00:32:32.380as Abigail Adams did coming into the Declaration of Independence, well, what does this mean for
00:32:39.120women? How are you going to remember the ladies? Or as Black petitioners did first in New England,0.95
00:32:47.020and then all around the British Atlantic, what does this mean for people of African descent?
00:32:53.660What does this mean for Native nations? And take on the work of defining the experiment for themselves and seeking life, liberty, and that collective pursuit of happiness through their own efforts.
00:33:10.680So I think what the revolution does is sort of chart a map, set a North Star for what the United States can mean. And there are a lot of navigators seeking to follow that route or indeed to alter it so that their own liberty quests come under the banner of what the Declaration of Independence has promised.
00:33:36.700you know i i hear people in contemporary politics sometimes say like well this isn't what the
00:33:45.200founding fathers would have intended do you think that they intended this declaration to be writ to
00:33:51.060be trapped in amber and never change or it sounds like you're saying that they expected and wanted
00:33:57.040this to grow and develop so i think they're the founding generation is comprised of individuals
00:34:03.840who are as different and as frequently in contention with each other as any of us.
00:34:10.960So there's no them who agrees on everything.
00:34:14.820Jefferson is very explicit on what he wants these foundations to mean.
00:34:21.000He writes that he is wary of the, quote, sanctimonious reverence with which people treat,
00:34:28.960in that letter he's speaking about the Constitution, which he firmly believes
00:34:33.480should be flexible and amendable. But he also extends that to the way that people come to think
00:34:40.900about the founding generation itself. He doesn't want portraits and statues. He doesn't celebrate
00:34:48.840his own birthday and sort of swats away in numerous letters and to his family, no, we should
00:34:57.800be celebrating the birthday of the United States. No, I was only one of a band striving for the same
00:35:05.200common good. Even his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, he renders as a kind of scribal
00:35:13.220act, right? It was an expression of the American mind for which he was merely the medium. So he's
00:35:21.640one who I think believes in the popular imagination and the sort of renewing energy of a Republican
00:35:32.960form of government, not the replacement of one deposed king with another form of almost
00:35:44.980I had never really thought about this before, but in a way, his skepticism of revealed religion mirrors his skepticism about setting the founding moment and its figures in marble.
00:36:03.660that's very interesting to hear because of the way that he is remembered and commemorated and in
00:36:12.420various statues and things i'm gonna completely change the topic slightly i want to know about
00:36:20.060macaroni and cheese i want to know what the latest thoughts are at monticello um about
00:36:26.280the invention of macaroni and cheese? We're pro, pro mac and cheese. Macaroni and cheese
00:36:33.800and ice cream are two of the commonplaces of a quote unquote American diet, which are actually
00:36:41.260French innovations that Jefferson picks up. Sally Hemings's brother, James, is Jefferson's
00:36:50.280enslaved cook in Paris. He learns to make a mean bechamel, negotiates per later reminiscences of
00:37:00.820his family with Jefferson for his own freedom, if he can train somebody else in the art of French
00:37:07.960cuisine, which he then does. So as far as we know, macaroni and cheese or pastas with a white
00:37:17.700And then, you know, flambéed cheese sauce makes it back to Monticello with Jefferson and courtesy of the labor of James Hemmings and later Ursula Granger.
00:37:30.960Is there, this is just me imagining my future trip I'm going to take to this historical site. Is there a restaurant on site? Does it serve macaroni and cheese?
00:37:38.880There is a restaurant on site. We have at times on the menu a macaroni and cheese that's inspired by that recipe. We make the ice cream. There's a lot that we do to help people approach history through the lens of the culinary arts, which seems very authentic to the figures who we interpret.
00:38:04.920We're part of a project right now called Culinary Diplomacy, which is a nonprofit in Washington, formerly part of the State Department, thinking about the ways that food breaks down walls between people and culture, and certainly one of the ways that Jefferson thought about his own dining table.
00:38:28.760so we use food a lot in our interpretation and our events. Jefferson was also of course one of
00:38:37.980the founding vintners of the United States and several years before I started at Monticello
00:38:44.500we purchased a small winery called Jefferson Vineyards which is on some of his original
00:38:52.220acreage, though none of the original vines that Philippe Mutsai sent over from Italy
00:39:19.640It was just something that I found so interesting when I was reading about, you know, Thomas Jefferson, as you well know, he wrote down everything he ever said or did or bought or anything.
00:39:33.380But yeah, I saw that in one of those he wrote down that he'd purchased some specific pasta cutters or something like he was serious about his pasta.
00:39:40.140He was serious about his palette. And I think, you know, we're really fortunate to have those records and the incredibly complete set of records that he kept and that others visiting the house wrote down so that we can continue to discover and restore things to the way they were.
00:40:04.000One of the things you'll see when you come visit is that we have just massively repainted the tea room that is behind Jefferson's dining room. It was whitewashed.
00:40:16.260We discovered through a combination of x-ray chromatography and documentary analysis that in fact, it was a kind of charcoal gray during his life. And the collections department has restored this room to the way he knew it.
00:40:36.720One of the things I like about moments like that where things change is that as educators, we get to share with a broad public, American and international, that things change because we're a site of curiosity and discovery.
00:40:53.760Not because we're imposing something on the past, but because when you approach the past with curiosity, you ask new questions, you discover things that you didn't know before.
00:41:05.360And I like that, that the site itself is not, as much as it's demonstrating here's what things were like, the site is not frozen in amber. You're always finding new ways to interpret what's there and to even just, you said, like just the color of the walls. So what sorts of things, because the 250th anniversary, pretty major, what sorts of things do you have planned for this major year?
00:41:29.080So we're thinking about the anniversary as a shovels in the ground moment, not a one and done party, although there will be a big party on the anniversary of the declaration itself, because our guy wrote it as a T-shirt in the Monticello gift shop says.
00:41:46.100But as the beginning of a generational investment in civic renewal, democracy renovation that should continue in the United States through the anniversary of the Bill of Rights in 2041.
00:42:02.340That's 15 years. It's the career of a school child from kindergarten or pre-kindergarten until three years post-secondary school.
00:42:12.840So we're trying to build knowledge, to build civic skills, the skills to fix problems in our community, to come together and understand each other and the dispositions that are necessary for a democracy to flourish.
00:42:29.840treating each other with respect, even with grace, as we come together and remember,
00:42:36.520as Jefferson said, that every disagreement of politics is not a disagreement of principle.
00:42:43.580We have an effort called Declaration Book Club, where we've got an open online educational
00:42:50.200resource scoping three meetings of any group that meets in a chapter, whether that's a Girl
00:42:57.860scout troop or a school classroom or an adult book club or a rotary group to talk about the
00:43:05.900declaration and its life. We've got a new tour called Founding Friends, Founding Foes, which
00:43:13.680looks at the journey of politics in the decades of Jefferson's public service, particularly focused
00:43:22.020on his fractious relationship with John Adams, which, you know, they came together to write
00:43:29.220the declaration. They came apart as political rivals in the 1790s, and they came back together
00:43:36.320as old men to do a kind of necessary stock taking of what America had become and could become.
00:43:45.680And then we'll have a big conference in the fall of 2026 called Tombstone Legacies, because we're, in addition to marking the 250th of the Declaration, also marking the 200th anniversary of Jefferson's death.
00:44:03.200the tombstone legacies are the three things and not one word more, as he put it, that he wanted
00:44:09.740on his epitaph, that he had written the Declaration of Independence, that he was the architect of the
00:44:17.500Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and that he was the father, as he put it, of the University
00:44:23.720of Virginia. So Republican government, freedom of conscience, and public education. And we'll do
00:44:32.080a conference on those three themes as they move from Jefferson's lifetime into being
00:44:39.000pillars of American constitutional democracy. July 4th is always a big day at Monticello,
00:44:45.900as you can imagine. Since 1963, we have marked it with an immigration and naturalization ceremony.
00:44:54.160Among his many other commitments, Jefferson was very committed to strengthening the United States
00:45:01.200through welcoming people from around the world.
00:45:53.580There are tons of things for kids to do, beginning in the Visitor Center, where we're opening
00:45:57.720a new Griffin Discovery Room in early 2026, where people can bring small children. And there are
00:46:08.080lots of hands-on activities, including exploring how it is that a place like Monticello comes to
00:46:14.620be kept. You know, what does it mean to take care of collections? What does it mean to take care of
00:46:20.760these gardens and grounds? What does it mean to do oral history or to puzzle through old documents?
00:46:27.720We have family-friendly tours that are deliberately scoped around the things that are interesting to children and their elders with guides who are especially privileged to serve a multi-generation audience.
00:46:42.760There's a mountaintop activities center where there are lots of hands-on activities, including writing with a quill pen.
00:46:50.400One of my favorite artifacts from my time at Monticello is something that I think a young kid scratched out with a quill pen, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
00:47:04.260P.S. This is hard. Referring to the act of cursive writing with a feather, but you could say the same about self-government itself.
00:47:14.860I just read you wrote a piece in The Atlantic recently about women at Monticello that I was looking at. And so you mentioned in there that the team worked really hard on this tour of women at Monticello and it just wasn't attended to the capacity that you were hoping. Is that tour still offered?
00:47:32.660It is offered in October, which is one of our busiest months, and then in March, which is Women's History Month. So it's a specialty offering rather than an everyday offering. It continues to be very successful for the people who take it. The people who take it love it. But as I wrote about in that piece, it wasn't as broad a public breakthrough as we hoped it would be.
00:47:57.200Which are the, like, I presume Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson's wife, Martha, who are the women who, I'm sure you can't list all of them, but what are some of the stories that you learned on that tour?
00:48:08.400So, you know, one of the one of the interesting things about Jefferson's semi-public life at Monticello, right, he's at Monticello most steadily in retirement after 1809 when he retires from the presidency.
00:48:25.020But he doesn't have a first lady to do the political work of greeting people, forming the dinner parties, writing the Christmas card list, right?
00:48:37.300All of those social tasks that, as the historian Catherine Algor wrote long ago, are a form of parlor politics.
00:48:45.280Um, so, uh, it's his daughter, um, and, uh, and, uh, Aunt Mark's, um, his sister who, um, who tend to play that role as matriarchs of the house.
00:48:59.020The house is filled with women and children, uh, both free and enslaved.
00:49:05.080Um, and, uh, you know, their, their spaces are not the spaces that we concentrate on in most tours.
00:49:13.500So when you do the highlights tour of the house, you move through his daughter's parlor, surrounded by women's pictures, to get to Jefferson's library and cabinet.
00:49:28.820And the women's history tour dotes on those interstitial spaces where women were doing not only a lot of living, but a lot of work.
00:49:38.440Um, one of the sort of poignant moments in that tour comes upstairs, um, where you see that his daughter, as she entered her fifties, was finally able to achieve a decor element that she had wanted for a long time, which was to have a freestanding bedstead rather than an alcove bed.
00:50:01.120Jefferson believed in space saving. I already mentioned the narrow stairs, right? And the
00:50:08.820alcove bed made a lot of sense in the grammar of his architecture. And he kept her in an alcove bed
00:50:17.280when she was a grown ass woman who, you know, who had had children of her own and knew differently
00:50:26.160how she wanted to live and wrote about finally getting her own bed in the way that you could0.95
00:50:33.240think of a 13 or 14 year old writing in today's world. So it's an, it's a tour that allows you to
00:50:42.640see the ways that women did essential labor in the house, including, including social labor,
00:50:50.520governed the household, but couldn't formally govern themselves.
00:50:55.920I'm curious to know why October is one of the busy times.
00:50:59.200It's beautiful. It's a peak school visitation time. It's the time that a lot of American schools
00:51:06.080are studying the founding era and school groups are a really important demographic for us.
00:51:13.440It's American football season. And so there are a lot of people who come through on the weekends
00:51:19.240to watch UVA football. There's a, there's a whole set of elements that happily come together for
00:51:27.600Monticello in October. That's interesting. Cause yeah, I don't know mentally, I'm trying to picture
00:51:31.860Virginia and what the climate is like there. Cause it's, I just remember when Thomas Jefferson and
00:51:37.460Sally Hemings were in France, it was unseasonably cold and snowy and he was happy to get back to
00:51:44.280Virginia. So I picture it's, it's, so you've got a hot summer, you've got like the fall colors,
00:51:49.460like how wintry does it get? Are you still open in the winter?
00:51:52.420It varies. Yeah, we are, we're open in the winter, six days a week. We're open seven days a week,
00:51:57.900except in January and February when we close on Tuesdays. Those are lower visitation months.
00:52:04.620They're also crucially those closed Tuesdays moments when our museum collections team can do
00:52:12.220intensive work in the house, both remedial work and repairing the damage that leading 300,000
00:52:20.180people a year through your house would inevitably do, but also that kind of interpretation and
00:52:27.200refreshment work that I spoke about with the tea room. So those closed to visitors Tuesdays are
00:52:34.820an intensive work season, especially for our curatorial and restorations departments.
00:52:40.740So many random questions, I know, but I was just wondering, the house is, I presume, currently heated with modern heating or is it still?
00:52:50.260The house has modern HVAC and modern lighting that interposes as little as possible.
00:53:00.800So you still get a sense of natural light in the house.
00:53:05.200We can use it in the dark in the holiday season.
00:53:08.500We have holiday evening tours where the house is laden with the extent of greenery that Jefferson would have had,
00:53:17.540which is, um, it's not like a Macy's store window, right? It's, it's quite, um, modest because the
00:53:23.960celebration of Christmas doesn't really come into its own, uh, in the United States until the 1820s
00:53:29.840and 1830s. Um, but there's enough light that you can, uh, that you can use the house at night. Um,
00:53:36.760uh, it's heated and air conditioned. Um, it is multiply fire suppressed and surveilled, um, so
00:53:45.040that we take our duty to perpetually care for this landmark very seriously. Well, that's true.
00:53:52.280Yeah. You wanted to make sure that people can come in and learn and sort of see what it would
00:53:56.920have been like, but at the same time with the safety of modern days. Is the house haunted?
00:54:04.920There are those who say so. There are those who have seen a hint or two. That's not my specialty.
00:54:13.480Do you do ghost tours like at Halloween?
00:54:40.020I mean, you know, we really do like to get as close as we respectfully can to what this would have been like as an embodied world.
00:54:49.660And I think that's the duty of the public historian, as well as a museum of the founding era, is to remember that these were people of flesh and blood who were as individual and as full of potential and as deeply flawed as me and Lo, even you.
00:55:11.280so for people who are interested in hearing about like it sounds like you have things happening
00:55:17.380all year round like not just july 4th but all the time like monticello has a website like all the
00:55:23.580all the activities you're talking about people can read up on it there right monticello.org is uh is
00:55:29.260under uh under refreshment so uh you will see our beautiful old website until president's day
00:55:36.640when we will roll out a new website that has a lot more video and a lot more capabilities to
00:55:44.820build your itinerary based on your interests in Black history or in gardening or in cuisine,
00:55:52.400etc. But all our events, a lot of our scholarly research, a huge database of Jefferson quotes
00:56:03.760and spurious family quotes about all the Jeffersoniana that you could ever want is
00:56:09.460there at Monticello.org. That's perfect. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today.
00:56:14.820When I was researching about Sally Hemings, I was like, oh, I really want to go to Monticello. And
00:56:18.820I'm like, I really want to go to Monticello. I hope I'm able to get there. Sounds like October
00:56:23.200is a good time. Well, we'd look forward to welcoming you, Anne. And a nice thing about
00:56:28.860coming in winter when it will be a lot warmer than it is in Canada is it's much more quiet.
00:56:54.920So if you're able to get to Monticello,
00:56:56.720I mean, I really wanna go, you should all go.
00:56:59.560You can learn all about it at monticello.org
00:57:01.880and even the website she was saying that they're going to be updating some stuff on it as well but
00:57:06.380there's lots of information there about the history of slavery about the life of sally
00:57:09.520hummings about macaroni and cheese there's lots of information there and so if you're not able to
00:57:14.840get there you can still glean a lot from the website from all the photos and videos and things
00:57:19.240and thanks again to dr jane kamensky for joining me for this really interesting conversation it's
00:57:24.260the first time i've had a curator of a historical site on the podcast before i'm always interested
00:57:30.440when I'm researching to see how the heritage, how the history of these complex people and
00:57:36.680complex situations is being interpreted now for a new generation, because this is sites
00:57:41.440like Monticello is where a lot of people learn about history.
00:57:44.160So there's a real, there's such a value to people who are presenting history to school
00:57:49.720groups, to adults, to everybody for the first time, and to keep changing and growing as
00:57:54.040we change in our understanding of history to change how we present it to people.
00:57:57.700And I think Monticello seems like a really good example of really adapting and working with how people want to engage with this history.0.94
00:58:21.760Just because he lived for quite a long time.
00:58:24.640He lived through the American Revolutionary era, the French Revolution era, through the Regency era, and I'm sure he'll be showing up a few more times in this season.0.98
00:58:34.940Anyway, thank you so much for listening, and until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.0.94
00:58:54.640this podcast are available at vulgarhistory.com by Aveline Malik. You can get early ad-free0.97
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