"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. Taylor’s rich, evocative book captures the surprising drama of that invention."
"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."
Wall Street Journal - Alan Pell Crawford
"[Taylor’s] overarching purpose [is] to demonstrate how the University of Virginia was from its very conception shaped and distorted by slavery."
"Alan Taylor’s 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 Jefferson’s career as an educational reformer and to the history of democratic self-government in Virginia."
"No historian has more astutely investigated or more powerfully written about the early American republic than Alan Taylor. In Thomas Jefferson’s Education , Taylor adds to his previous prizewinning studies of early American politics, expansion, and arts and letters, with an examination of the founders’ vision of education, reckoning, at once, with its audacity and its timidity."
"A Pulitzer prize–winning 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."
"An account of Jefferson's home state and university…A complex but fascinating story."
★ 2019-07-15
Beginning with young Jefferson's student days at the College of William & Mary, Taylor (History/Univ. of Virginia; American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804 , 2016, etc.) describes a church-run school whose students had little or no interest in learning; few stayed long enough for a degree. They were irreverent and defiant, and they drank, gambled, fought, and even destroyed church and town property in drunken riots. Due to certain entrenched rules about honor, no Southern gentleman would testify against a fellow student. Within this milieu, Taylor depicts Jefferson as a man trained from childhood to exercise sovereign authority over slaves. Jefferson felt slavery was wrong in principal but essential in practice, and his abolition plan could only work with deportation. Officials in Virginia used the Bill of Rights' guarantee of free exercise of religion to ban state assistance to churches and repealed the incorporation of the Episcopalian Church. This included cutting funding and eliminating the parish tax. Jefferson fully supported this secularization and planned to use those savings and taxes for a public education system. His master plan included primary schools, including girls, and colleges (secondary) run by each county feeding one university—at Charlottesville. His schools were to be absolutely secular, and while rejecting leadership by blood, he ensured that class distinctions remained, seeking enlightened aristocrats of merit. The narrative bogs down a bit at the end with the history of the university, but Taylor is a master historian, and he delivers a highly illuminating account in which "Jefferson's social context in Virginia looms even larger than his unique personality and career achievements." Furthermore, the author plumbs the depths of his subject's objectives, faults, and ideals.
A book that refreshingly adds real substance to the abundant literature on Jefferson.
