Thomas Jefferson Archives - Public Seminar

Democracy

A Republic, If We Can Afford It

Our Republic depends on both economic stability and civic participation

November 6, 2025 • by Larry Schwartz

When the Constitutional Convention of 1787 ended, Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the delegates had created. His reply—“A republic, if you can keep it”—was no mere quip from an aging sage. It was a warning that republics are fragile, rare, and never self-sustaining. What Franklin implied was that ...

Activism

Reckoning with Deva Woodly’s Reckoning

What kind of coalition must the Left forge in order to defeat Trumpism and whatever comes after it?

January 18, 2022 • by Sidney Tarrow

Black Lives Matter was not born in the streets, even if it sometimes moved there following the police murder of Michael Brown in 2014, and again after the killing of George Floyd in 2020. But the movement, after these intense episodes of protest and direct action has not stayed in ...

Reckoning with Deva Woodly’s <em>Reckoning</em>

History

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

What the fate of the monument to Edward Coles in Edwardsville, Illinois, can tell us about the ironies of hoping that statues might tell a new American story

July 29, 2020 • by Jeffrey Manuel

Recently, renewed efforts have been made to diversify the kinds of Americans commemorated by public monuments. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an op-ed by David Blight, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning biographer of Frederick Douglass; as the title of the piece put it, “There’s a Chance to Tell a ...

The Case of the Hijacked Statue of the Great Abolitionist

Economy

We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Reconstructing our tax system is an integral part of future national industrial policy as we restart the economy

July 2, 2020 • by Marshall Auerback

Taxation is one of those areas that exposes the contradictions at the heart of globalization. Globalization of goods has proceeded quickly, as has the harmonization of industrial standards across countries. Harmonization of taxation? Not so easy. The power to tax is the ultimate national prerogative, one that very few sovereign nations would ...

We Won’t Have a Truly Global Economy Until We Start Taxing It That Way

Feature

Two Cheers for Hypocrisy

A gray appreciation of John McCain, thinking about Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump

August 31, 2018 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Francois de La Rochefoucauld: “Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.” I have long been intrigued by this epigram and its political implications. I like its ironic cogency, and think that historic and contemporary hypocrites demonstrate the insight of this pithy observation, but also its limitations. I am thinking about ...

Uncategorized

The Charlottesville Syllabus

Confronting the history and present of white supremacy in a college town

May 2, 2018 • by The Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation

12 AUGUST 2017 The Charlottesville Syllabus is a resource created by the Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation to be used to educate readers about the long history of white supremacy in Charlottesville, Virginia. While the resources selected and summaries written are by UVA graduate students, the Syllabus is not sanctioned by ...

Feature

Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s Fate

A response to Keval Bhatt

October 22, 2017 • by Michael Weinman

In a stirring, passionate, and bracingly clear recent contribution to the ongoing Charlottesville thread in our “Power and Crisis” vertical, University of Virginia student Keval Bhatt accounts for his decision to join others in shrouding the famous, indeed iconic, statue of Thomas Jefferson on the grounds of the University. I ...

Feature

Jefferson’s Two Bodies

Memory, protest, and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond

October 19, 2017 • by Isaac Ariail Reed

The students who shrouded Jefferson pulled the memory of the author of the Declaration of Independence — that document so useful to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Jr., and so many others — into a larger series of conflicts over memorialization. These conflicts have tended focus on monuments to the ...

Feature

Subverting the Symbols of White Supremacy

The wolf and the fox

October 17, 2017 • by Keval Bhatt

Fascism had always seemed to me a thing of the past. It was almost like a fairy-tale I was told -- a passive deterrent, an unreal warning -- while going through school. But school was not my education; my real education occurred as I entered the fight against fascism in ...