rdf-syntax-grammar
mods:
  schema location: http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3 http://www.loc.gov/standards/mods/v3/mods-3-2.xsd
  title info:
    title: American sphinx
    sub title: the character of Thomas Jefferson
  name:
    name part: Ellis, Joseph J.
    role:
      role term: creator
    role:
      role term: author.
  type of resource: text
  genre: bibliography
  genre: biography
  genre: Nonfiction.
  genre: Biography
  genre: Biographies
  genre: Biographies.
  origin info:
    place:
      place term: nyu
    date issued: 1998
    edition: First Vintage edition.
    edition: [Revised November 1998].
    issuance: monographic
  language:
    language term: eng
  physical description:
    form: print
    extent: xx, 440 pages ; 21 cm
  abstract: Offers a reassessment of the life, image, and career of Thomas Jefferson, examining his complex personality, controversies about the man and his beliefs, and his accomplishments.
  abstract: For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity--now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety--has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person.For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing." In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams." For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large--a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles.From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath; that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a day at his writing desk; that sometimes his polit…
  table of contents: Preface and acknowledgments -- Prologue: Jeffersonian surge : America, 1992 -- 93 -- Philadelphia : 1775-76 -- Paris : 1784-89 -- Monticello : 1794-97 -- Washington, D.C. : 1801-04 -- Monticello : 1816-26 -- The future of an illusion -- appendix: A note on the Sally Hemings scandals.
  note: Joseph J. Ellis.
  note: Originally published: New York : Knopf, 1997.
  note: "November 1998"--Page xx.
  note: Contains several revisions from the First Vintage edition published in April 1998.
  note: Includes bibliographical references (pages 369-421) and index.
  note: National Book Award Winner.
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Jefferson, Thomas
      name part: 1743-1826
    topic: Psychology
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Jefferson, Thomas
      name part: 1743-1826
    topic: Psychologie
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Jefferson, Thomas
      name part: 1743-1826
  subject:
    name:
      name part: Jefferson, Thomas
  subject:
    topic: Psychology
  subject:
    topic: Charakter
  subject:
    topic: Jefferson, Thomas,
    topic: 1743-1826
    topic: Psychologie.
  classification: E332.2 .E45 1998
  classification: 973.4/6092
  classification: B
  classification: NO 2495
  identifier: 0679764410
  identifier: 9780679764410
  identifier: 0679444910
  identifier: 96026171
  identifier: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/bios/random057/96026171.html
  identifier: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/description/random049/96026171.html
  related item:
    location:
      url: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/bios/random057/96026171.html
  related item:
    location:
      url: http://catdir.loc.gov/catdir/description/random049/96026171.html
  location:
    physical location: TAG TAGC
  record info:
    record content source: DPB
    record creation date: 980415
    record change date: 20240808153402.7
    record identifier: in00004815527
    language of cataloging:
      language term: eng