June 2022

 

Saving Monticello: The Newsletter

The latest about the book, author events, and more

Newsletter Editor - Marc Leepson

 

Volume XIX, Number 6                                                           June 2022

“The study of the past is a constantly evolving, never-ending journey of discovery.” – Eric Foner 

THE LIBRARY: Thursday, May 26, 2022, was a memorable day in my professional life: the day that I turned over my Saving Monticello research materials to the Jefferson Library at Monticello. I had been thinking about the best place to archive those thousands of pages of transcribed interviews, photocopied newspaper and magazine articles, letters, documents, books, and many other primary and secondary sources that I had accumulated since 1997 when I first began researching the story of the Levy family and Monticello. 

The longer I thought about it, the more I realized that the Jefferson Library would be the perfect place for future scholars and anyone else interested in the post-Jefferson history of Monticello.

With Endrina Tay, the Fiske and Marie Kimball Librarian,
 at Monticello's Jefferson Library. Photo by Ian Atkins,
Courtesy of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello

Once this small mountain (pun intended) of material is catalogued and archived, anyone with an Internet connection will have access to a large amount of the collection that deals with the Levy family and with virtually every other aspect of what happened on the mountaintop after July 4, 1826. 

The 15,500-foot, state-of-the-art Jefferson Library at Monticello was dedicated on April 13, 2002, Thomas Jefferson’s birthday—just six months after the publication of Saving Monticello. The beautiful building is adjacent to Monticello on the former Kenwood plantation, which was once owned by Thomas Jefferson.   

Before the library opened as part of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies (ICJS), the Thomas Jefferson Foundation had housed its research materials in several small library collections at Monticello and in other office space nearby.

In the early 1990s then-Foundation President Daniel P. Jordan led the effort to build a central research library on the mountaintop. The Foundation, working with the University of Virginia, leased the 78-acre Kenwood property, plans were drawn up, and construction began on September 15, 2000. Since opening two years later the Library and the ICJS have hosted hundreds of scholars, teachers, and students. The building houses books, journal and newspaper articles, ephemera, unpublished research, websites, microforms, audio-visuals, photographs, and digital full-text files. 

The material, naturally, focuses on Thomas Jefferson and Monticello, but the library also contains materials on the colonial, Revolutionary War, and Early Republic periods, as well as religion and philosophy and European arts and culture. ICJS, of which the library is an integral part, holds international scholarly conferences, panel discussions, teacher workshops, lectures, and curriculum-based tours. 

“Opening this magnificent new library in Jefferson’s name, we again unfurl the glorious banners of liberal education, the open mind, the pursuit of truth, freedom of religion, the free and open exchange of ideas, the love of learning,” the eminent historian David McCullough said in his remarks at the library’s dedication.  

The Library's Robert H. and Clarice Smith Reading Room
Hartman-Cox Architects photo

The Jefferson Library, under the leadership Endrina Tay, who succeeded Jack Robertson as the Fiske and Marie Kimball Librarian in October 2021, is open to public researchers by appointment only. To make the arrangements, go to https://bit.ly/LibAppointment 

In this, the Jefferson Library’s twentieth year, the library features a commemorative exhibit, “The Jefferson Library: Two Decades of Scholarship and Community,” in the lobby. The exhibit is open to the public, as is its online component at https://bit.ly/AnnivExhibit  You can learn more about the library at https://bit.ly/JLibrary and search through the collections at https://bit.ly/JLibrarySearch 

In the very near future those collections will contain all of the research materials (much of it digitized) that I have gathered in the 25 years since I began researching at the old Monticello Research Department. 

I’m extremely grateful to everyone at Monticello—especially Endrina Tay and Susan Stein, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation’s Richard Gilder Senior Curator, Special Projects—for allowing me the privilege of donating my work to the Library’s collections. 

DAVID AND JEFFERSON: In 1833, as I wrote in Saving Monticello (and several times in this newsletter), Uriah Levy commissioned the renowned French sculptor Pierre-Jean David d’Anger to create a full-length statue of Thomas Jefferson, which now sits in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda. David also created a bronze medallion of Uriah Levy at the same time, a piece of art that now housed in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. 

In 1840, David created another, very different kind of work that included a sculpted image of Thomas Jefferson. Here’s a first-hand report about it from my friend and colleague, Steven Pressman, (the director of “The Levys of Monticello” documentary) who came across it during a recent trip to France: 

What do Uriah Phillips Levy, Johannes Gutenberg, Thomas Jefferson and the city of Strasbourg, all have in common?

It turns out that the same French sculptor, David d’Angers, who was commissioned by Levy in the early 1830s to create a bronze sculpture of Jefferson, also included Jefferson as part of a dramatic monument that he made in honor of Gutenberg, the German inventor of the printing press.

The Gutenberg monument, created by d'Angers in 1840, is located in Strasbourg, where Gutenberg lived for several years and where he worked on his new printing invention in the 1440s. Jefferson appears in one of the four bronze relief panels at the base of the Gutenberg statue, each of which commemorates historic uses of a printing press. 

The panel that depicts Jefferson celebrates the printing of the Declaration of Independence and includes several other signers of the document, along with other figures such as George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette and Simon Bolivar, who helped several countries in South America gain their independence from Spain. 

‘THE LEVYS OF’ DOC:  Speaking of “The Levys of Monticello,” Pressman’s terrific documentary that tells the post-Jefferson history of Monticello, it continues to make the film festival rounds and garner accolades. The doc’s most-recent honor came last month when it received the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Washington, D.C. Jewish Community Center’s JxJ 2002 film festival. Because of that the festival announced that they will have a third in-person screening of the film on July 21. Ticket info at https://bit.ly/July21Screening 

The next screenings will be online as part of this year’s 2022 Ann Arbor Jewish Film Festival, starting on July 3. As per the usual film festival rules, you can register for the festival’s online screenings only if you are a Michigan resident. More info at https://bit.ly/AnnArborFilmFest 

EVENTS: Two talks on my book, Flag: An American Biography coming up this month; the first on Saturday, June 11, will be a Zoom talk for the California Association of the Society of the Cincinnati; the second, on Flag Day, Tuesday, June 14, will be at the Glebe retirement community in Daleville, Virginia.

If you’d like to arrange an event for Saving Monticello or for any of my other books, email me at marcleepson@gmail.com

For details on other upcoming events, check the Events page on my website:  https://bit.ly/NewAppearances

GIFT IDEAS:  Want a personally autographed, brand-new paperback copy of Saving Monticello? Please e-mail marcleepson@gmail.com  I also have a few as-new, unopened hardcover copies, along with a good selection of brand-new copies of my other books: Flag: An American Biography; Desperate Engagement; What So Proudly We Hailed; Flag: An American Biography; and Ballad of the Green Beret: The Life and Wars of Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler.