Susan stein monticello biography template

Funds were raised; I helped write a treatment; and a video promo was produced. Then WHRO backed out and the project died. T hen, in the summer of , I had a call from Steve, an old friend and colleague. We had worked together at Congressional Quarterly in Washington in the eighties and had kept in touch as we both moved on to free-lance writing careers.

Steve began making documentaries about ten years ago. I readily and wholeheartedly agreed. Then the stars aligned and he went to work. Susan Stein: This is an important question.

Susan stein monticello biography template

I think Jefferson was known to be kind to people, but I think what that question really is getting at is this: What was the nature of slavery at Monticello? Was it violent here? We know that Jefferson tried to ameliorate slavery at Monticello, to make it better for individuals and their families. He did so by shifting from barracks-style housing to individual houses for enslaved people, and he tried to hire overseers who were instructed not to use the whip.

Susan Stein: What most historians believe now is that Jefferson had a relationship with Sally Hemings that lasted for a long time. Some people debate when the relationship began, but it certainly was going on by , when a child was born to Hemings whose father is thought to have been Jefferson. Sally Hemings, blog. So we think that though her children got special treatment, in fact the Hemings clan was the largest enslaved family at Monticello.

Many of them occupied the most important positions and proximity to Jefferson and his family; they were very trusted members of the community. In fact, she herself was the daughter of an African woman and an English sea captain. It is also believed that Elizabeth helped care for Martha Jefferson in her final illness before she died in , just 10 years after she and Jefferson were married in Can you share some of the things that you, as a Jefferson expert, want more people to know about?

He wanted to see Americans respected in the eyes of the rest of the world, and having an ennobling architecture was one way he thought that America could engender that respect. Architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, one of the architects of the U. Capitol in Washington, wrote that Jefferson planted the arts in America. Stein Harry N. Thomas Jefferson was, by any reckoning, one of the most remarkable men ever to have crossed America's political stage.

In he drafted the Declaration of Independence, and throughout the Revolution and in the posts he held thereafter - governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state, vice president, and president - Jefferson's responsibilities were enormous and his accomplishments profound. Yet during those years he also was able to design his own house, Monticello, the magnificent Palladian mansion in central Virginia, and later to establish the University of Virginia and to plan its principal buildings.

Revised edition. Wagoner, Jr. Lewis, Jr. Gary E. Moulton, ed.