Vulgar History Podcast
Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, and America’s 250th Anniversary
November 27, 2025
Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is a special Thanksgiving episode. You know, shout out to all the American listeners. For full transparency, I’m Canadian, but I understand it is your Thanksgiving weekend. So, today we’re going to be talking about Thomas Jefferson and the history at Monticello, which is the house that he built, that he lived in. We talked about that a lot this past season when we were talking about some American revolutionary history, including our two episodes about Sally Hemings.
Today, I’m joined for a chat by Dr. Jane Kamensky, the President and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, which is the iconic historic site. I came across this when I was researching Sally Hemings, that Monticello has been, for decades now, really doing the work. They’re not hiding the fact that slavery was really braided into the history of this site and into Thomas Jefferson’s life. So, I was really interested to learn from Jane about how Monticello… How it functions, how they include it in their history, how they make sure that it’s not forgotten, how they make sure that it’s commemorated and remembered, and how to balance out all the things that Thomas Jefferson is celebrated for with a modern understanding of his personal life and what we know now.
America is approaching its 250th anniversary in 2026; 250 years since 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which also has lots of… There’s lots of content about that at Monticello, which we’re going to talk about as well. Jane also is here to talk about how they’re going to be commemorating that in lots of innovative and interesting ways at Monticello. So, please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Jane Kamensky.
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Ann: So, I’m joined by Dr. Jane Kamensky, president and CEO of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. Is that what it’s technically called? Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello?
Jane: Our technical name is The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Incorporated. We’re a private 501(c)(3). But Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello is generally how we do business; it helps people who have the building in their mind’s eye identify with Jefferson as its, sort of, creator and owner; and it helps people who have Jefferson in their mind’s eye remind themselves that Monticello is the place where he and his world express themselves.
Ann: Can I ask, like, as a Canadian, a very basic question: Is Monticello on any American currency? The building?
Jane: Yes. We are on the back of the nickel, and Jefferson is also on the $2 bill, which is one of the less used American paper currencies.
Ann: Okay. Yeah, because it’s like, in terms of just famous buildings of American history, this is kind of it. Like, Monticello is one that most people have heard about, I would think.
Jane: I think arguably the most iconic presidential home. We’re the only presidential home in the United States that’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site. We share that designation with the University of Virginia’s Rotunda, which is also a Jefferson-designed building. And then, the currency where Roosevelt, who was a big fan of Jefferson, puts Monticello on the back of the nickel, sort of cements it in a mind’s eye view. But yeah, it’s one of the most famous buildings in the United States, created by a statesman who was also an architect.
Ann: So, I wanted to talk to you about just your work. I mean, not that you’ve been there for that— You’ve been there for long enough, but this is before your time, I think, or correct me if I’m wrong, that the Monticello tours and things started actively engaging with the history of enslavement on the site.
Jane: So, Monticello has never not recognized enslavement, right? It was a place that people of African descent predominated by as much as 10 or 12 to one over people of European descent in Jefferson’s day. So, that would have been visible and part of a plantation expectation for anybody who visited there. It was remembered as a place of slavery after the Thomas Jefferson Foundation was created in 1923, and by the middle of the 20th century, archaeological excavations had begun to document the material history of slavery and the lives of enslaved people.
But it wasn’t until the late 1980s or early 1990s that the history of people enslaved on the Mountaintop entered public tours. The creation of the Getting Word African American oral history project in ‘93 is a kind of good marker of seeking to braid the stories of Jefferson with the stories of the bondsmen and women who made his life possible. So, through the ‘90s, the braiding of the interpretation of Jefferson’s biography with the world-building that made his biography possible increased.
In the 2010s, we excavated and reinterpreted the dependency wings of Monticello, which is where all of the cooking and other, you know, wine storage and beer provisioning, et cetera, for the house were done, where some enslaved people lived, and also reinterpreted Mulberry Row, which was the main artisanal street of the plantation. That Mountaintop Project, as it was called, was completed in 2018. So, as it was in Jefferson’s lifetime, Monticello, as a site that’s interpreted for a public, has continued to evolve and continued to be a laboratory of historical practice and the understanding of constitutional democracy.
I started in this role in January of ’24, so that work was done by my predecessor, and my predecessor’s predecessor. It’s been a commitment of the whole foundation for a long time to follow Jefferson’s dictum that we pursue the truth wherever it might lead. And in excavating, interpreting the lives of enslaved people on the property, we bring it closer to the way that Jefferson and his legal family experienced it from the 1770s until his death in 1826.
Ann: Just in terms of what’s going on… Well, I guess it’s been going on for a decade or more. Other former plantations that are now wedding venues and things like that, I think, have been bumping up against trying… You were describing it as braiding the history, and I think that’s such a good way to describe it. Other places that haven’t done that, I think, have just been bumped up against— If you’ve been places that haven’t engaged with that part of their history… It’s just impossible to not engage with that at this point. So, I think the fact that Monticello was always, it sounds like, that’s always been an important part of the site itself, which is of increasing importance more recently.
But have other locations come to you to ask for advice on how to engage with this side of their history? I’m just curious, because it seems like just Monticello was one of the first to really actively do this.
Jane: So, we’re part of a number of networks sharing interpretive practice lessons and our own journey of continual learning. And I think we were indeed – and here I’m bragging on my predecessors rather than myself – we were indeed on the cutting edge of this act, not of revisionism, but of recovery, right? It’s the recovery of the world that Jefferson inherited, modified, and knew throughout his whole life.
I think Monticello has a special obligation here over and against all of the sites in the United States that had the history of transatlantic slavery in their substrate, which would include every site in the southeast, but also all of those sites in the mid-Atlantic and New England that profited from enslavement offshore. Monticello is the only one whose patriarch wrote the Declaration of Independence, so we are really at the knife’s edge of the paradox of the early American founding, where the foremost philosopher of liberty on the western side of the Atlantic, who wrote perhaps the most famous and important sentence in the English language, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal,” was also, himself, an enslaver, and knew that slavery was wrong and wrote about that his entire adult life. So, in order to understand our world, I think you need to understand Jefferson. It’s that sort of triple-layer paradox, not only writing about liberty and practicing chattel slavery, but also knowing what he was doing was wrong, that makes him such a rich figure to think with.
We all participate in systems that we inherited, global systems, and we might think in our day of how impossible it would be to disentangle oneself from greenhouse gas emission for a year, or even something more modest than that, from not using plastic for a year, right? I’m looking at your beautiful home full of wood, but also your AirPods. So, we all live inside global systems that were not of our making, and that the disentangling of is a formidable task. That’s how Jefferson found himself in the system of slavery, which he did not create.
He stepped outside it enough to do two things. One was to write the Declaration of Independence, having imbibed Locke and George Mason, Rousseau and Montaigne, and all the other freedom thinkers who went into his imagination of an egalitarian pre-political world, stepped outside it enough to do that, to found a country based on that logic. And to write searing critiques of slavery, including in the draft version of the Declaration that Congress excised that long paragraph from. But he didn’t step outside it enough, fundamentally, to change it during his lifetime, and saw himself not only as holding other people in bondage, but as himself being in bondage to the institution of slavery. His famous metaphor of holding the wolf by the ears, you know, “You cannot make peace with it, and you cannot let it go.”
In those ways, I think he’s a wonderful illustration of what it means to appreciate the predicaments of history. We all live in the predicaments of history, and I think there are a few people in the American past who illustrate that so poignantly and profoundly as Jefferson’s life and legacy does.
Ann: Well, I mean, this brings us to a discussion of Sally Hemings. I’m curious, how is she currently being commemorated or celebrated at Monticello?
Jane: So, Sally Hemings is one of the most famous people in the 18th and 19th-century world now, thanks to the work of generations of descendants and scholars, but especially my former Harvard colleague, Annette Gordon-Reed. For all that we think about and with her, we know remarkably little about her. We don’t know the date that she was born; we don’t know what she looked like, except for a few recollections about her, the colour of her complexion and her handsomeness; we don’t know how tall she was; we know nothing of her interior life.
For these reasons, it’s fitting that the exhibition that we have about her at Monticello – which is called The Life of Sally Hemings and is in a small room in the south wing dependencies below the house, where she and members of her family may have lived – she’s represented as a wrapped mannequin, but without a face, reminding us what we cannot see. You know, we tell the story as generations of documentary evidence from the time that she and Jefferson were both alive and through the reminiscence of her son Madison in the 1870s, another enslaved person in the house, Isaac Granger Jefferson in the 1840s, we tell her story as it has come down to us, but we can’t see her face or hear her voice.
I think that’s a useful reminder that the world of what we in the United States call Founding Fathers is crowded with people that we cannot see. I’ve been writing about this for some 250th anniversary essays. We think of 56 men in a room signing the Declaration of Independence as portrayed by Jonathan Trumbull, sometime after the fact, and it’s much harder to see the throngs of faces in the streets and in their households. Sally Hemings is one of those who touched history in profound ways, whose shadow hung over Jefferson’s entire political career, whose children were his children, but who we really can’t put ourselves in the shoes or in the headspace of without resorting to fiction.
Ann: I think that’s a really astute choice, to celebrate her without putting up a portrait of, maybe she looked like this, or to guess, or to even just to have somebody representing her, but just to say, “We don’t know, but here’s the importance of her.” It gives her a different sort of power in a different way because if there was a portrait, everybody would just be like, “Oh, look, she’s pretty,” and you could kind of move on. But you’re kind of emphasizing her importance by having so much other information about her.
And wasn’t there, in the last couple of years, a room that was discovered, like a secret Sally Hemings room in the main house?
Jane: The room that we think that she and some of her children may have lived in is in that south dependency of the house; there is a Hemings cabin that was occupied by her kin, John and Priscilla Hemings. One of the things that I think is striking about that recreated cabin on Monticello’s Mulberry Row is when you stand on the second floor of the house, on the east side of the house where the nursery was, some of the children that Priscilla Hemings cared for, Jefferson’s grandchildren, you can see the cabin out the window, right? These lives were very proximate to each other, very entangled with each other.
Jefferson famously didn’t believe in wasting space on staircases. So, when you tour Monticello and take our behind-the-scenes tour, which takes you into the second and third floors of the house, you take the staircases that all of Jefferson’s legal family and all of the enslaved people who attended them would have taken, and they’re barely a foot wide. People would have brushed past each other all the time. So, saying that Sally Hemings did not have a room in the house itself doesn’t suggest that there’s great distance between these people. You know, slavery was an intimate institution in all kinds of ways.
Ann: So, it’s coming up on the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. And you said that there was an earlier draft where Thomas Jefferson had written some more things, some more anti-slavery things, and those were taken out. So, is that something you have at Monticello, like, the earlier drafts of this?
Jane: We have facsimiles of the early drafts. There are about five copies, one at the Massachusetts Historical Society, one at the Library of Congress, one in the Small Special Collections Library of UVA. Jefferson kept copies of his own drafts and often shared them with people, shared them right after Congress adopted the format that we all know today, sending to a friend saying, “You judge which one was better.” He was very proud of his own draft and found the excisions painful.
The largest excision, which I think was 167 words, would have been the 28th grievance, blaming King George III for foisting the institution of chattel slavery on the colonies and pushing back against the attempts of colonial British Americans to end that “noxious trade in men,” as they put it. Interestingly, there’s an intellectual historian at the University of Maryland, Holly Brewer, studying the Royal African Company, who argues that that allegation was actually substantially true, that through the monopolistic control of the Royal African Company, the Hanoverian dynasty and George III himself did prop up the transatlantic slave trade at a time when many planters were ready to be rid of it. Congress struck that entire paragraph.
One of the things that we study when we study the Declaration is the compromises that were necessary to make the American Union. Compromise is something that we should always celebrate and critique at the same time. The colonies of British America, including the ones that became your country and the ones that became mine, were incredibly disparate places, 26 of them, on the eve of the United States, 13 of which rebelled. And the price of holding that coalition of 13 together was a set of trade-offs, and the Carolinas and Georgia are believed to have insisted on the excision of that paragraph, which even Virginia, the largest slave-holding colony in the provincial world, was willing to stand behind.
Ann: A few months ago, we were doing a series of episodes on my podcast about the French Revolution, and I do want to talk about Jefferson in Paris a little bit. But also I just wanted to say what I’m noticing, or what I’ve noticed in the French Revolution and the way that it kind of fell apart, is that versus the American Revolution, I think the fact that they were able to make these compromises, this huge group of people, when you think about that many people today, coming to consensus would be really challenging. But it does seem like the way that the American Revolution happened, and it stuck in a way that the French Revolution did not. It seems to be just that the people involved, they found ways to all work together so that they could move forward with this strategy.
What do you think Thomas Jefferson’s time in Paris, because it was such a similar time period with the struggles they were having and the struggles that were happening in America, what do you think that showed him? Or do you think that gave him ideas?
Jane: I think Jefferson viewed himself as giving the French ideas, that French philosophy had meant an awful lot to him coming up in a rural provincial place, going to school in Williamsburg, Virginia, coming of age in Albemarle County in western Virginia. This is really the frontier of the British colonial world. Yet, he grew up in a house that was, by the standards of its day, filled with books, which is to say his father had about 200. A place that was rustic enough that a vast library was 200 books. Quite early in his life, he would have come into contact with the French ideas of liberty and equality that were formative to him as a thinker, leading up to the Declaration of Independence and beyond.
When he gets there in the 1780s, he’s the emissary, following Franklin, of his new country abroad. And it is a kind of coming back to life for him after the death of his beloved wife, Martha, when he really retreats from the world for some time after losing her quite young, after a sickness following childbirth. So, he’s dazzled by the opulence of what he sees; he writes about the foods and the wines and the cultural mores.
Interestingly, support for France comes to be one of the great dividing lines in early American politics. To look at Jefferson and Adams as a kind of shorthand; Adams believing that the United States should follow Britain in the model of a middling commercial republic, and Jefferson believing in the potentiality of a truly revolutionary state that is willing, as Paine said, “to begin the world again.” Of course, Jefferson and Paine are both allied in that belief that France will emerge as a sister republic.
He leaves revolutionary France before it descends into terror, but he never really parts company with the French experiment and famously says, “The tree of liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants.” So, believes in a right of revolution, even to the kind of upheaval that he sees in France. There’s a late letter between Jefferson and Adams where Adams is talking about what the government excesses are that each of them fears. He says that, you know, Jefferson fears the one or fears the few, meaning fears monarchy or fears aristocracy, whereas Adams fears the mob.
Jefferson really does believe in the potential of ordinary people, though, of course, when he was imagining the category of citizen, he wasn’t thinking about women, or free or enslaved Black people. But to the extent that he defines and broadens the definition of the political people, he believes in youth. He believes that the better ideas are always coming down the road. A wonderful colleague of mine, a historian named Andrew Davenport, who heads Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies, talks about this inspiring belief in generations yet unborn, and that, at the same time, that’s kicking the can down the road on difficult issues.
Ann: That’s interesting, yeah. It’s kind of both things; on the one hand, it’s something that you see today, like with Gen Z and stuff, you know, like people are getting so much more politically active than previous generations were, and how there’s a division between kind of the old guard and the younger people. So, it’s like, it would be good if people could have could support the younger generation more. But also at the same time, you don’t want to leave everything to them. So yeah, it’s kind of both things.
Jane: Yeah, I mean, and this, of course, was an area of great concern in the young United States as they’re thinking about the transmission of this polity, you know, unique in the history of the modern world, right, to have an extensive republic, going back to Greek and Roman principles, but spreading over hundreds and then thousands of miles. And they’re all thinking, you know, from the time of the Confederation Congress, through the Constitutional Convention and beyond, how do we pass this thing on? You know, the famous Franklin apocryphal phrase, which he probably didn’t say, “A republic, if you can keep it.” So, this question of: How do you keep it?
For Jefferson, a large part of that answer was investing in the young, right? His last great act of public service was founding the University of Virginia, and one of the principles behind that effort was that a form of self-government, a republican form of self-government, demands an educated citizenry. It’s a difficult form of political life to carry on our backs. Monarchy is very easy, right? All you have to do is salute the king. A republic is demanding, and in order to cultivate the knowledge, the virtue, the dispositions towards one’s fellow people that is necessary to carry it forward, one of the things you need is citizen education. So, they’re thinking of this question of in the long, long relay race that is democratic life, how do you pass the baton?
Ann: That’s such an interesting… And I haven’t thought about that part of it. Just in my podcast, we looked at pre-Revolution, the Revolution itself, and then afterwards. I hadn’t thought about how do you make sure it stays? How do you continue? I mean, I guess they benefited from the fact that people like Thomas Jefferson lived fairly long lives, so those people were still around to kind of help oversee things. But even just things like the university, like you said. Yeah, just to make sure that the next generation of people aren’t just going to undo everything you just did. That would be just as much work, if not more work, I would think.
Jane: And I think it’s interesting that you point to the longevity of some of the people who are capital-F Founders. By the time of their death, the country as a whole, its media ecology is aware of the aging of Jefferson and Adams and Charles Carroll of Maryland, who are among the last surviving signers. Jefferson and Adams famously dying on the same day on July 4th of 1826. So, I think sage elders who people come to seek wisdom is one part of that answer.
But I think a larger part is just the energy of masses of ordinary people who are far more literate than most of the societies of their day, and who read these founding documents and say, as Abigail Adams did coming into the Declaration of Independence, “Well, what does this mean for women? How are you going to remember the ladies?” Or as Black petitioners did first in New England, and then all around the British Atlantic, “What does this mean for people of African descent? What does this mean for Native nations?” And take on the work of defining the experiment for themselves and seeking life, liberty, and that collective pursuit of happiness through their own efforts.
So, I think what the Revolution does is, sort of, chart a map, set a north star, for what the United States can mean, and there are a lot of navigators seeking to follow that route, or indeed to alter it, so that their own liberty quests come under the banner of what the Declaration of Independence has promised.
Ann: You know, I hear people in contemporary politics sometimes say like, “Well, this isn’t what the Founding Fathers would have intended.” Do you think that they intended this declaration to be writ, to be trapped in amber and never change? Or it sounds like you’re saying that they expected and wanted this to grow and develop.
Jane: So, I think the founding generation is comprised of individuals who are as different and as frequently in contention with each other as any of us; there’s no them who agrees on everything. Jefferson is very explicit on what he wants these foundations to mean. He writes that he is wary of the “sanctimonious reverence” with which people treat… In that letter, he’s speaking about the Constitution, which he firmly believes should be flexible and amendable.
But he also extends that to the way that people come to think about the founding generation itself. He doesn’t want portraits and statues. He doesn’t celebrate his own birthday, and sort of swats away in numerous letters, and to his family, “No, we should be celebrating the birthday of the United States. No, I was only one of a band striving for the same common good.” Even his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, he renders as a kind of scribal act, right? It was an expression of the American mind for which he was merely the medium.
So, he’s one who I think believes in the popular imagination, and the sort of renewing energy of a Republican form of government, not the replacement of one deposed king with another form of almost biblical literalism, right? I had never really thought about this before, Ann, but in a way, his skepticism of revealed religion mirrors his skepticism about setting the founding moment and its figures in marble.
Ann: That’s very interesting to hear because of the way that he is remembered and commemorated in various statues and things.
I’m going to completely change the topic slightly. I want to know about macaroni and cheese. I want to know what the latest thoughts are at Monticello about the invention of macaroni and cheese.
Jane: We’re pro. [Ann laughs] We’re pro mac and cheese. Macaroni and cheese and ice cream are two of the common places of an “American diet,” which are actually French innovations that Jefferson picks up.
Ann: Sally Hemings’s brother, right?
Jane: Sally Hemings’s brother, James, is Jefferson’s enslaved cook in Paris. He learns to make a mean béchamel and negotiates, per later reminiscences of his family, with Jefferson for his own freedom, if he can train somebody else in the art of French cuisine, which he then does. So, as far as we know, macaroni and cheese, or pastas with a white and then flambéed cheese sauce, makes it back to Monticello with Jefferson and courtesy of the labour of James Hemings and, later, Ursula Granger.
Ann: Is there… This is just me imagining my future trip I’m going to take to this historical site. Is there a restaurant on site? Does it serve macaroni and cheese?
Jane: There is a restaurant on site. We have, at times, on the menu a macaroni and cheese that’s inspired by that recipe. We make the ice cream. There’s a lot that we do to help people approach history through the lens of the culinary arts, which seems very authentic to the figures who we interpret. We’re part of a project right now called Culinary Diplomacy, which is a nonprofit in Washington, formerly part of the State Department, thinking about the ways that food breaks down walls between people and culture, and certainly, one of the ways that Jefferson thought about his own dining table. So, we use food a lot in our interpretation and our events.
Jefferson was also, of course, one of the founding vintners of the United States, and several years before I started at Monticello, we purchased a small winery called Jefferson Vineyards, which is on some of his original acreage, though none of the original vines that Philip Mazzei sent over from Italy in the 18th century survived. But thinking about why food and wine were important to Jefferson and his circle, and what we can do to communicate history through the culinary arts, is certainly on our minds at Monticello now.
Ann: It was just something that I found so interesting when I was reading about… Thomas Jefferson, as you well know, he wrote down everything he ever said, or did, or bought, or anything. [chuckles]
Jane: The weather twice a day for 50 years.
Ann: But yeah, I saw that in one of those he wrote down that he’d purchased some specific pasta cutters or something. He was serious about his pasta.
Jane: He was serious about his palate. And I think, you know, we’re really fortunate to have those records and the incredibly complete set of records that he kept and that others visiting the house wrote down so that we can continue to discover and restore things to the way they were.
One of the things you’ll see when you come visit is that we have just massively repainted the tearoom that is behind Jefferson’s dining room. It was whitewashed. We discovered through a combination of X-ray chromatography and documentary analysis that, in fact, it was a kind of charcoal gray during his life, and the collections department has restored this room to the way he knew it. One of the things I like about moments like that where things change is that as educators, we get to share with a broad public, American and international, that things change because we’re a site of curiosity and discovery, not because we’re imposing something on the past, but because when you approach the past with curiosity, you ask new questions, you discover things that you didn’t know before.
Ann: I like that, that the site itself is not… As much as it’s demonstrating “Here’s what things were like,” the site is not frozen in amber. You’re always finding new ways to interpret what’s there, and to… Even just what you said, like, just the colour of the walls.
So, what sorts of things – because the 250th anniversary, pretty major – what sorts of things do you have planned for this major year?
Jane: So, we’re thinking about the anniversary as a shovels in the ground moment, not a one and done party – although there will be a big party on the anniversary of the Declaration itself, because “Our guy wrote it” as a T-shirt in the Monticello gift shop says – but as the beginning of a generational investment in civic renewal, democracy, renovation that should continue in the United States through the anniversary of the Bill of Rights in 2041. That’s 15 years; it’s the career of a school child from kindergarten or pre-kindergarten until three years post-secondary school. So, we’re trying to build knowledge, to build civic skills, the skills to fix problems in our community, to come together and understand each other, and the dispositions that are necessary for a democracy to flourish, treating each other with respect, even with grace, as we come together and remember, as Jefferson said, that “Every disagreement of politics is not a disagreement of principle.”
We have an effort called Declaration Book Club, where we’ve got an open, online educational resource scoping three meetings of any group that meets in a chapter, whether that’s a Girl Scout troop, or a school classroom, or an adult book club, or a rotary group, to talk about the Declaration and its life. We’ve got a new tour called Founding Friends, Founding Foes, which looks at the journey of politics in the decades of Jefferson’s public service, particularly focused on his fractious relationship with John Adams, which, you know, they came together to write the Declaration, they came apart as political rivals in the 1790s, and they came back together as old men to do a kind of necessary stocktaking of what America had become and could become.
Then we’ll have a big conference in the fall of 2026 called Tombstone Legacies, because we’re, in addition to marking the 250th of the Declaration, also marking the 200th anniversary of Jefferson’s death. The Tombstone Legacies are the three things “and not one word more,” as he put it, that he wanted on his epitaph; that he had written the Declaration of Independence, that he was the architect of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, and that he was the father, as he put it, of the University of Virginia. So, republican government, freedom of conscience, and public education. We’ll do a conference on those three themes as they move from Jefferson’s lifetime into being pillars of American constitutional democracy.
July 4th is always a big day at Monticello, as you can imagine. Since 1963, we have marked it with an immigration and naturalization ceremony. Among his many other commitments, Jefferson was very committed to strengthening the United States through welcoming people from around the world. We carry on that legacy with a naturalization ceremony that has welcomed, I think, more than 4,000 new citizens since its beginning. Last year, we had 74 from 35 countries on five continents around the world. There is no more heartening place to be, to see the way that we can continue to live the Declaration of Independence, than to hear new citizens talk about their choice to become Americans. We will do that on July 4th, along with a broader Declaration birthday party.
Ann: I’m just curious, either for the 250th anniversary or just on a daily basis, what sorts of things are there for kids to do? I’m just curious.
Jane: There are tons of things for kids to do! Beginning in the Visitor Center, where we’re opening a new Griffin Discovery Room in early 2026, where people can bring small children. There are lots of hands-on activities, including exploring how it is that a place like Monticello comes to be kept. What does it mean to take care of collections? What does it mean to take care of these gardens and grounds? What does it mean to do oral history, or to puzzle through old documents?
We have family-friendly tours that are deliberately scoped around the things that are interesting to children and their elders, with guides who are especially privileged to serve a multi-generation audience. There’s a Mountaintop Activities Center where there are lots of hands-on activities, including writing with a quill pen. One of my favourite artifacts from my time at Monticello is something that I think a young kid scratched out with a quill pen, “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. PS, this is hard,” [Ann laughs] referring to the act of cursive writing with a feather, but you could say the same about self-government itself.
Ann: I just read, you wrote a piece in the Atlantic recently about women at Monticello that I was looking at. You mentioned there that the team worked really hard on this tour of women at Monticello, and it just wasn’t attended to the capacity that you were hoping. Is that tour still offered?
Jane: It is offered in October, which is one of our busiest months, and then in March, which is Women’s History Month. So, it’s a specialty offering rather than an everyday offering. It continues to be very successful for the people who take it; the people who take it love it. But as I wrote about in that piece, it wasn’t as broad a public breakthrough as we hoped it would be.
Ann: I presume Sally Hemings, Thomas Jefferson’s wife, Martha. Who are the women who – I’m sure you can’t list all of them – but what are some of the stories that you learn on that tour?
Jane: One of the interesting things about Jefferson’s semi-public life at Monticello, he’s at Monticello most steadily in retirement after 1809 when he retires from the presidency, but he doesn’t have a First Lady to do the political work of greeting people, forming the dinner parties, writing the Christmas card list, all of those social tasks that, as the historian Catherine Allgor wrote a long ago, “Are a form of parlour politics.” So, it’s his daughter and Aunt Marks, his sister, who tend to play that role as matriarchs of the house.
The house was filled with women and children, both free and enslaved, and their spaces are not the spaces that we concentrate on in most tours. So, when you do the Highlights Tour of the house, you move through his daughter’s parlour, surrounded by women’s pictures, to get to Jefferson’s library and cabinet. The Women’s History Tour dotes on those interstitial spaces, where women were doing not only a lot of living, but a lot of work.
One of the poignant moments in that tour comes upstairs, where you see that his daughter, as she entered her fifties, was finally able to achieve a decor element that she had wanted for a long time, which was to have a freestanding bedstead rather than an alcove bed. Jefferson believed in space saving; I already mentioned the narrow stairs, right? And the alcove bed made a lot of sense in the grammar of his architecture, and he kept her in an alcove bed when she was a grown-ass woman, who had had children of her own and knew differently how she wanted to live. She wrote about finally getting her own bed in the way that you could think of a 13 or 14-year-old writing in today’s world. So, it’s a tour that allows you to see the ways that women did essential labour in the house, including social labour, governed the household, but couldn’t formally govern themselves.
Ann: I’m curious to know why October is one of the busy times.
Jane: It’s beautiful. It’s a peak school visitation time. It’s the time that a lot of American schools are studying the Founding era, and school groups are a really important demographic for us. It’s American football season, and so there are a lot of people who come through on the weekends to watch UVA football. There’s a whole set of elements that happily come together for Monticello in October.
Ann: That’s interesting, because yeah, I don’t know… Mentally, I’m trying to picture Virginia and what the climate is like there. I just remember when Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were in France, it was unseasonably cold and snowy, and he was happy to get back to Virginia. So, you’ve got a hot summer, you’ve got the fall colours. How wintry does it get? Are you still open in the winter?
Jane: It varies. Yeah, we are open in the winter six days a week. We’re open seven days a week, except in January and February when we close on Tuesdays. Those are lower visitation months. They are also, crucially, those closed Tuesdays, moments when our museum collections team can do intensive work in the house; both remedial work and repairing the damage that leading 300,000 people a year through your house would inevitably do, but also that kind of interpretation and refreshment work that I spoke about with the tearoom. So, those closed-to-visitors Tuesdays are an intensive work season, especially for our curatorial and restorations departments.
Ann: So many random questions, I know, but I was just wondering, the house is, I presume, currently heated with modern heating, or is it still…?
Jane: The house has modern HVAC and modern lighting that interposes as little as possible, so you still get a sense of natural light in the house. We can use it in the dark. In the holiday season, we have holiday evening tours where the house is laden with the extent of greenery that Jefferson would have had, which is, it’s not like a Macy’s store window, right? It’s quite modest because the celebration of Christmas doesn’t really come into its own in the United States until the 1820s and 1830s, but there’s enough light that you can use the house at night. It’s heated and air-conditioned. It is multiply fire-suppressed and surveilled so that we take our duty to perpetually care for this landmark very seriously.
Ann: Well, that’s true. Yeah, you want to make sure that people can come in and learn and sort of see what it would have been like, but at the same time, with the safety of modern days. Is the house haunted?
Jane: There are those who say so. There are those who have seen a hint or two. That’s not my specialty.
Ann: Do you do ghost tours, like at Halloween?
Jane: We don’t.
Ann: So, it’s not that kind of museum? Okay.
Jane: It’s not that kind of museum, although not a year goes by that somebody fails to ask, “When are you going to do Haunti-cello?”
Ann: [laughs] The name is right there. I appreciate it, I appreciate it. Like, the spirits, the people who live there are among you every day in all of the interpretation that is happening, clearly.
Jane: That’s right. That’s right. I mean, we really do like to get as close as we respectfully can to what this would have been like as an embodied world. And I think that’s the duty of the public historian, as well as a museum of the Founding era, is to remember that these were people of flesh and blood who were as individual and as full of potential and as deeply flawed as me and low, even you.
Ann: So, for people who are interested in hearing about— It sounds like you have things happening all year round, not just July 4th, but all the time. Monticello has a website; all the activities you’re talking about, people can read up on it there, right?
Jane: Monticello.org is under refreshment, so you will see our beautiful old website until Presidents Day, when we will roll out a new website that has a lot more video and a lot more capabilities to build your itinerary based on your interests in Black history, or in gardening, or in cuisine, et cetera. But all our events, a lot of our scholarly research, a huge database of Jefferson quotes and spurious family quotes about all the Jeffersoniana that you could ever want, is there at Monticello.org.
Ann: That’s perfect. Well, thank you so much for talking with me today. When I was researching about Sally Hemings, I was like, “I really want to go to Monticello,” and now I’m like, “I really want to go to Monticello.” [laughs] I hope I’m able to get there. Sounds like October’s a good time.
Jane: Well, we’d look forward to welcoming you, Ann. A nice thing about coming in winter, when it will be a lot warmer than it is in Canada, is it’s much more quiet, and you can experience the house at a more domestic scale that way.
Ann: True, instead of being crammed in there with all the school visits and stuff. Although I’m sure that’s lovely too.
Jane: It is lovely, too.
Ann: Well, thank you so much for talking with me today.
Jane: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks.
—————
So, if you’re able to get to Monticello, I mean, I really want to go, you should all go. You can learn all about it at Monticello.org. Even the website, she was saying that they’re going to be updating some stuff on it as well, but there’s lots of information there about the history of slavery, about the life of Sally Hemings, about macaroni and cheese. There’s lots of information there, so if you’re not able to get there, you can still glean a lot from the website, from all the photos and videos and things.
Thanks again to Dr. Jane Kamensky for joining me for this really interesting conversation. It’s the first time I’ve had a curator of a historical site on the podcast before. I’m always interested when I’m researching to see how the heritage, how the history of these complex people and complex situations is being interpreted now for a new generation, because sites like Monticello is where a lot of people learn about history, so there’s a real… There’s such a value to people who are presenting history to, you know, school groups, to adults, to everybody for the first time, and to keep changing and growing as we change in our understanding of history, to change how we present it to people. I think Monticello seems like a really good example of really adapting and working with how people want to engage with this history.
Anyway, this is Vulgar History, my name is Ann Foster. We’re back next week with a regular episode, back on our Regency Era beat. Although I feel like Thomas Jefferson is probably going to show up at some point this season too, and/or or I hope, Sally Hemings too, just because he lived for quite a long time. He lived through the American Revolutionary era, the French Revolution era, through the Regency era. I’m sure he’ll be showing up a few more times in this season. Anyway, thank you so much for listening. And until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out.
Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Ann Foster. Editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. Regency Era artwork by Karyn Moynihan. Social media videos by Magdalena Denson. Transcripts of this podcast are available at VulgarHistory.com by Aveline Malek. You can get early, ad-free episodes of Vulgar History by becoming a paid member of our Patreon at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. Vulgar History merchandise is available at VulgarHistory.com/Store for Americans and for everyone else at VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. Follow us on social media @VulgarHistoryPod. Get in touch with me via email at VulgarHistoryPod@gmail.com.
References:
Learn more about Monticello at monticello.org
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