New Dominion Bookshop will host a book talk and signing with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alan Taylor on Friday, October 11, from 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM.
Taylor’s new book, Thomas Jefferson’s Education, will be released from W. W. Norton & Company in October. This event will be co-sponsored by the Charlottesville Center for History and Culture and is free to attend.
About the Book: From a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian comes a brilliant, absorbing study of Thomas Jefferson’s campaign to save Virginia through education. By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor.
In 1819 Jefferson’s intensive drive for state support of a new university succeeded. His intention was a university to educate the sons of Virginia’s wealthy planters, lawyers, and merchants, who might then democratize the state and in time rid it of slavery. But the university’s students, having absorbed the traditional vices of the Virginia gentry, preferred to practice and defend them. The university was born with the flaws of a slave society. Instead, it was Jefferson’s beloved granddaughters who carried forward his faith in education by becoming dedicated teachers of a new generation of women.
About the Author: Alan Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for History, most recently for The Internal Enemy, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award. Taylor lives in Charlottesville and Davis, California.
About New Dominion Bookshop
Serving Albemarle and Central Virginia since 1924, New Dominion Bookshop is the oldest independent bookseller in Virginia. Located in Historic Downtown Charlottesville, New Dominion is a general trade bookshop that serves as the hub for readings and other literary events in the community.For more information, visit ndbookshop.com.
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