Thomas Jefferson's Education [Paperback]

Taylor& probes [Jeffersons] ambitious mission in clear prose and with great insight and erudition. Annette Gordon-Reed, [Taylors] overarching purpose [is] to demonstrate how the University of Virginia was from its very conception shaped and distorted by slavery. A richly detailed account of the origins of UVA.& Lively and informative. Mr. Taylor does a splendid job of documenting the sordid goings-on at William & Mary and the University of Virginia, establishing how saturated in slavery they both were. A Pulitzer prizewinning historian, Taylor explores the links between slavery and the founding of the University of Virginia.& Taylor shows how modern inequalities still undermine attempts to improve higher education. No historian has more astutely investigated or more powerfully written about the early American republic than Alan Taylor. In Alan Taylors extraordinary new book illuminates the limits of republican reform in a society built on slavery. It is a major contribution to our understanding of Thomas Jeffersons career as an educational reformer and to the history of democratic self-government in Virginia. With characteristic eloquence, Alan Taylor chronicles the unlikely emergence of one of the most important experiments in American education: the University of Virginia. Caught between the promise of a new nation of freedom and the reality of a declining slave society, Thomas Jefferson and his allies forged an institution at once intellectually innovative and socially conservative. Taylors rich, evocative book captures the surprising drama of that invention.