About

Frank Cogliano (University of Edinburgh) will discuss his new book (co-authored with Peter Onuf), Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours. Fifty years after signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams reassured the nation from his deathbed, "Thomas Jefferson survives." Unaware that Jefferson had died mere hours earlier, Adams was in a larger sense correct: Jefferson had been immortalized in the American imagination. Dissatisfied with the reductive clichés that now define Jefferson’s legacy, Peter S. Onuf and Francis D. Cogliano restore the founding father to his historical context, elucidating in three essays how Jefferson’s understanding of history shaped his responses to the crises of his time, how he conceived of the physical entity that became the United States, and how he articulated a new national identity in 1776. Through their search for understanding, Onuf and Cogliano demonstrate not only why Jefferson matters, but how his wisdom can be applied today.