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In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson
In Pursuit of Reason The Life of Thomas Jefferson Author:Noble E. Cunningham Ballantine Books hardcover reprint, 2009. Originally published, c1987, in Baton Rouge, by the Louisiana State University Press, as part of its Southern Biography series. — This book fills a longstanding need of interested readers, students, and scholars for an authoritative single-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. Although there have been ... more »important works on Jefferson before, their very massiveness has proven daunting. Now Dr. Cunningham, one of America's foremost Jefferson scholars, has produced an absolutely first-rate biography that is as concise as it is complete. In one relatively brief volume, he has provided a sharp and thorough, if traditional, account of Jefferson that interpreted the Sage of Monticello primarily as a man of the Enlightenment. Cunningham manages to do equal justice to Jefferson's political thought, scientific interests, and political career and also give ample attention to his personal life, albeit with the slavery-related blinders of most of his generation of Jefferson scholars.
Includes more than twenty black-and-white illustrations, bibliography and index.
Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. (1926-2007) received his PhD in History from Duke University in 1952. The leading authority on the party politics of the Jeffersonian era, he taught at the University of Missouri at Columbia.« less