On July 31, 2012, Gore Vidal died at his home in in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles, where he had moved in 2003, the same year that Yale University Press published his acute observations on our founding fathers in the acclaimed Inventing a Nation: Washington, Adams, Jefferson. In The
Joanne B. Freeman— On Saturday, July 18, 1795, an angry crowd stood gathered before Federal Hall in New York City, eager to protest the Jay Treaty, which eased ongoing tensions between Great Britain and the United States. Convinced that the treaty was too favorable to the British, leading Republicans had
Today we’re talking revolutions. We recently spoke with historian Janet Polasky, whose latest book Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World discusses the eighteenth‑century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality during the time of the American Revolution. What emerges is that the dream of liberty among America’s
Follow @yaleSCIbooks “If heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market…” – Thomas Jefferson, 1811 Thomas Jefferson was passionate about horticulture and his gardens at his home in Monticello. Peter J.
You may know Thomas Jefferson as the third U.S. President but ever consider that he has, thus far, been our nation’s only epicurean president? In his book “A Rich Spot of Earth”: Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello, Peter J. Hatch introduces yet another of Jefferson’s many extra-political interests that
Follow @yaleSCIbooks The name Thomas Jefferson brings to mind some of his greatest achievements: Author of the Declaration of Independence, third President of the United States, and Founder of the University of Virginia. But there’s another side to America’s Renaissance man that, though less well known, is just as praiseworthy.
As summer begins, new cooking and eating habits begin to form: fresh produce from gardens and orchards become more widely available, but how have our practices changed alongside technological and economic developments? For most Americans, the store racks, and now even online grocers, have eliminated the agricultural pleasures, ponderings, and
“No person has been more zealous to enrich the United States by the introduction of new and useful vegetables,” –Nicholas King, 1806 Certain US Presidents have been notorious for their green thumbs, perhaps none more so than Thomas Jefferson and the garden he kept at home at Monticello. Weeks before
Follow @yaleSCIbooks Sharon McGrayne’s The Theory That Would Not Die is the story about a statistical method of analysis that almost wasn’t. Created by the Reverend Thomas Bayes and further molded by scientist Pierre-Simon Laplace, Bayes’ theorem is a statistical analysis method for probability that takes an initial guess or
This morning the NYTimes Home section ran a front page article on Thomas Jefferson’s gardens at Monticello, focusing on both the gardens themselves as well as the gardening philosophy of the founding father who designed them. In the article, reporter Anne Raver speaks extensively with Peter Hatch, the director of