Remembering Jefferson: Who He Was, Who We Are

An expert on presidential history and national identity explores the complicated and conflicted ways Americans remember Thomas Jefferson and what these impressions reveal about the nation he helped to found.

Thomas Jefferson is everywhere. In Washington, DC, and on Mount Rushmore. In history textbooks and children's picture books. On Broadway and HBO. Jefferson is even on our money--both the ubiquitous nickel and the rare $2 bill. The many different ways that Americans remember the third president of the United States tell us very little about Jefferson himself, but they tell us a lot about the American people.

In Remembering Jefferson, presidential scholar Mary E. Stuckey examines various sites where Jefferson appears--his home at Monticello, references by other presidents, monuments and memorials, popular culture, and children's literature--as a way of interrogating national identity. She is less interested in the actual Jefferson than in how he is used across a variety of contexts to make claims about what it means to be American in the contemporary moment.

Stuckey finds that Jefferson is a remarkably useful and multipurpose symbol. He reminds people of the importance of the nation's founding. He provides an opportunity to reflect on inclusion and exclusion, on race and racism. He gives people a way to ground national identity in the past, while keeping it open to change. Jefferson was so complicated and multilayered that he has been purposed to suit a variety of agendas throughout history and across the entire political spectrum.

In our fraught political moment, where debates over America's founding have become cultural battlegrounds, Remembering Jefferson is a timely reminder that how we think about the past reflects who we are in the present.