John Adams & Thomas Jefferson: Libraries, Leadership, and Legacy

details and registration at: http://www.adamsjefferson.com

“I cannot live without books,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams in 1815. Books were a passion for our nation’s third president, who collected three different personal libraries for himself over the course of his life. Books were equally an enthusiasm for Adams, our second president. In fact, Adams also built an impressive personal library.

Adams and Jefferson were among the leading American book collectors of their day, but each man’s relationship with the printed word took him far beyond the thrill of the hunt for a fugitive title. Their reading permeated their thought and actions, providing an important foundation for their contributions to American governance.

“John Adams & Thomas Jefferson: Libraries, Leadership, and Legacy,” a conference which the MHS will co-sponsor with the Boston Public Library and Monticello June 21-27, will probe the place of books in the lives of these two American presidents. How did their reading and books affect the intellectual roots of the American polity? Presentations by a stellar cast of scholars will look at how each man developed his library; discuss how reading significantly shaped the political, philosophical, and religious identities and actions of these two Founding Fathers; and address the enduring legacy of Adams’s and Jefferson’s intellectual heritage today.

The conference will begin in Boston on June 21 at the Boston Public Library with a keynote address by Ted Widmer, the director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Over the course of the next two days, sessions at the MHS and the BPL will consider “Adams and Jefferson as Book Collectors”; “Law, Libraries, and Political Philosophy”; “Adams, Jefferson, and Nationalism”; and “Libraries and the Enlightenment.” After a travel day, the conference will reconvene at Monticello and the University of Virginia, where there will be panels on “Jefferson and Adams as Readers”; “Libraries and the Revolution”; “Jefferson, Adams, and Religion”; and “The Legacy of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.” Each session will consider at three or four pre-circulated essays and will afford a generous amount of time for comments and questions from the floor. In addition to formal sessions, there will be tours of John Adams’s Library at the Boston Public Library, the MHS’s important Adams and Jefferson manuscript holdings, the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy, and Jefferson’s residence, Monticello. Participants will also be able to see Jefferson’s greatest architectural accomplishment, the heart of the campus of the University of Virginia.

Information on “John Adams & Thomas Jefferson: Libraries, Leadership, and Legacy” is available on its website, http://www.adamsjefferson.com, including directions for registering for the conference.

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