78 min listen
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, "Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
Wilson Jeremiah Moses, "Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
ratings:
Length:
66 minutes
Released:
Dec 10, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Description
In Greek mythology Prometheus is the trickster Titan who gives fire to humanity. As Wilson Jeremiah Moses explains in his book Thomas Jefferson: A Modern Prometheus (Cambridge University Press, 2019) America’s third president demonstrated many of the same traits as this legendary figure over the course of his long life of intellectual activity. As Moses reveals, this is reflected in the malleable nature of Jefferson’s legacy, which has been reinterpreted continuously by generations of politicians and historians in the generations since his death. To better understand Jefferson’s thinking, Moses dissects the corpus of Jefferson’s writings and examines the span of his activities to draw from them his views on everything from politics and economics to his understanding of the various fields of science which he explored. What emerges from this effort is the complex and sometimes contradictory stew of ideas which Jefferson applied over the course of his political career, during which he helped shape the ideology and institutions which Americans live with today.
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Released:
Dec 10, 2019
Format:
Podcast episode
Titles in the series (100)
Toby Lester, “The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, and the Epic Story of the Map That Gave America its Name” (Free Press, 2009): Why the heck is “America” called “America” and not, say, “Columbia?” You’ll find the answer to that question and many more in Toby Lester‘s fascinating and terrifically readable new book The Fourth Part of the World: The Race to the Ends of the Earth, by New Books in Early Modern History