Thomas Jefferson's Education

From the Pulitzer Prize– winning historian, a brilliant, absorbing study of Jefferson and his campaign to save Virginia through education.

By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully crafted history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. Thomas Jefferson shares center stage with his family and fellow planters, all dependent on the labor of enslaved black families. With a declining Virginia yielding to commercially vibrant northern states, Jefferson in 1819 proposed to build a university to educate and improve the sons of the planter elite. They, he hoped, might one day lead a revitalized Virginia free of slavery— and free of the former slaves.

Jefferson's campaign to build the university was a contest for the future of a state and the larger nation. Although he prevails, Jefferson's vision of reform through education is hobbled by the actions of genteel students whose defiant sense of...