Thomas Jefferson Survives: A New Look on the 250th Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence

Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum is thrilled to welcome historian and professor Francis D. Cogliano for a reading and lecture on his new book Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours.

Thomas Jefferson has been reinvented more than perhaps any American president in history. In the nineteenth century, slavery's defenders invoked Jefferson's defense of states' rights while abolitionists drew on his antislavery writings in support of their cause. After the Civil War, Jefferson's reputation declined because of his association with secession and disunion, but in the twentieth century, his image soared as he came to embody the democratic values America fought for during World War II.

Unsurprisingly, Jefferson's legacy has shifted yet again in the twenty-first century, effectively becoming a partisan talisman--jettisoned by the left as a plantation patriarch and repurposed by the right as an avatar of white nationalism. Dissatisfied with these political caricatures and manic swings,…