Podcast appearances and mentions of peter onuf

Adam Smith, born in 1723 and the father of modern economic theory, remains one of the most influential writers on markets development and state formation.  He is also the author of Theory of Moral Sentiments, an examination of how people relate to one another.  Peter S. Onuf, the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, prolific scholar of the life and thought of Thomas Jefferson, joins us to talk about Adam Smith, the Scottish enlightenment, and Revolutionary America. 

In a special Independence Day episode, scholars Akhil Amar of Yale Law School and Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia join host Jeffrey Rosen for a discussion on the historical legacy of founding father Thomas Jefferson, America's third president and principal author of the Declaration of Independence. In a National Constitution Center event a few months ago, Professor Amar announced his intention to “break up with” Thomas Jefferson; and in this episode of We the People, we explore why he's decided to break up with Jefferson—including his actions and views on slavery—and what aspects of Jefferson's legacy deserve defense. Professors Amar and Onuf also explore the positive and negative aspects of his legacy and influence on the country, as well as recommendations on how to understand and study Jefferson today.   Resources: Akhil Amar, The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840 (2021) Peter Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (2007) Peter Onuf and Annette Gordon-Reed, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2017) Peter Onuf, Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire (2018) Should We Break up with the Founders?, We the People episode (April 2023) Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org.    Continue today's conversation on Facebook and Twitter using @ConstitutionCtr.    Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate, at bit.ly/constitutionweekly.    You can find transcripts for each episode on the podcast pages in our Media Library. 

Our guest today is the brilliant and entertaining Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy. Andrew is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the former Saunders Director of the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello. From 2015-2022 he was the Vice President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation. Andrew also spent thirteen years at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he served as the Chair of the Department of History and held the Rosebush Professorship. Andrew attended Columbia University before earning a BA, MA, and PhD in History from Oriel College at Oxford University. Andrew is the author of The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind: Thomas Jefferson's Idea of a University (University of Virginia Press), and is the co-editor with John Ragosta and Peter Onuf of The Founding of Thomas Jefferson's University (University of Virginia Press) and European Friends of the American Revolution with John A. Ragosta and Marie-Jeanne Rossignol (forthcoming, University of Virginia Press). Andrew is perhaps best known for The Men Who Lost America:  British Leadership, the Revolutionary War and the Fate of Empire (Yale University Press), which won numerous awards, including the George Washington Book Prize, The Society for Military History's Distinguished Book Award in US History, the National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution's Excellence in American History Book Award, and the New-York Historical Society Annual American History Book Prize. His first book, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (University of Pennsylvania), has now gone through its third printing. In addition, Andrew is widely published in many of the top journals in the field. Andrew is an award-winning teacher and he has held numerous visiting professorships and fellowships. Most recently, he was a Visiting International Fellow at the Wilberforce Institute at Hull University. In 2016-17, he was the Sons of the American Revolution Visiting Professor at King's College, London. Andrew is a fellow of the American Antiquarian Society and, of course, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Andrew first researched in an archive when he was only 15, and has never looked back. Join us as we chat about growing up in the US and the UK, the American War for Independence, the Grenadier Guards band, hosting Presidents at Monticello, and Virginia wines!

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. She's the author of six books, including The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Peter Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Virginia. He's also author of numerous books, including most recently Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance.  In 2017, these two giants in the history of the early American republic teamed up to publish the book at the heart of our discussion today, “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. This book ranks among the most original and engaging studies of Thomas Jefferson and his times to appear in recent years. They join us today to discuss our third President, his life and times.

On Presidents Day, National Constitution Center President and CEO Jeffrey Rosen moderated a discussion about the diverse cast of characters that helped to found the nation, including America’s early presidents. Jeff was joined by historians Joanne Freeman of Yale who is also a host of the podcast Backstory, Robert McDonald of West Point, and Peter Onuf of the University of Virginia—all of whom are contributors to the new volume Revolutionary Prophecies: The Founders and America’s Future. Additional resources and transcript available at constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/media-library Questions or comments about the show? Email us at podcast@constitutioncenter.org.

For close to ten years, Peter Onuf hosted BackStory along with Ed Ayers and Brian Balogh. Now, with the show coming to a close, Peter is back to help kick off a new series we’re doing on the show. These are episodes in which all five of our hosts will look back on their time with the show and highlight some of their favorite moments.  With so much time at the show, Peter had a lot of material to work with. But he has narrowed it down to three conversations that still stick out in his memory today. Each one captures something that he considers to be unique about BackStory. 

This morning, China published a short list of products exempted from its tariffs on American made goods. This list comes about a month before scheduled talks between Chinese negotiators and Trump administration officials.   The current U.S. trade war with China is not unlike previous conflicts. In this segment from BackStory’s 2015 show, “They Might Be Giants: China and the U.S.,” host emeritus Peter Onuf talks to historian John Haddad about how Americans smuggling opium into China during the 19th century led the Chinese to crack down on trade that was already very restrictive. And learn how the Opium Wars were a turning point in Chinese history that still influences them today.   Image: President Nixon gamely tries out his chopsticks at a banquet given in his honor, 1972. Source: White House Photo Collection.   BackStory is funded in part by our listeners. You can help keep the episodes coming by supporting the show: https://www.backstoryradio.org/support

Hurricane Dorian struck the Bahamas this week, and east coast states from Florida to North Carolina are bracing for its impact. In preparation, governors are declaring states of emergency to allow emergency management teams to coordinate and act quickly. But in this segment from BackStory's 2012 show, "Weathering the Storm," host emeritus Peter Onuf learns from Oxford University professor Gareth Davies that responses to disasters are often fraught with politics. Image: Poseidon by Mark Rain (www.azrainman.com). Source: Flickr (CC BY 2.0)   BackStory is funded in part by our listeners. You can help keep the episodes coming by supporting the show: https://www.backstoryradio.org/support

In Jacksonian America, as Grund exposes, the wealthy inhabitants of northern cities and the plantation South may have been willing to accept their poorer neighbors as political and legal peers, but rarely as social equals. In this important work, he thus sheds light on the nature of the struggle between “aristocracy” and “democracy” that loomed so large in early republican Americans' minds.Francis J. Grund, a German immigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including this fictional, satiric travel memoir in response to Alexis de Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America. Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund's dynamic engagement in American political and social life and brings to light many of Grund's reflections previously published only in German. Mattes shows how Grund's work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States.-Armin Mattes earned his Ph.D. in History at the University of Virginia, working with Peter Onuf on the origins of American democracy and nationhood. Dr. Mattes then spent the 2012-2013 academic year as the Gilder Lehrman Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, where he completed his first book, Citizens of a Common Intellectual Homeland: the Transatlantic Context of the Origins of American Democracy and Nationhood, 1775-1840, which was published by University of Virginia Press in 2015. His newly translated and annotated edition of Francis J. Grund's Aristocracy in America was published in Spring 2018 on the Kinder Institute's Studies in Constitutional Democracy monograph series with University of Missouri Press, and immigrant is also currently at work on a book project that explores the transformation of the meaning and practice of political patronage in America from 1750 to 1850. Dr. Mattes has taught at the University of Virginia and Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen (Germany), and he served as a Kinder Institute Research Fellow in History from 2014-2017.---Support for the Age of Jackson Podcast was provided by Isabelle Laskari, Jared Riddick, John Muller, Julianne Johnson, Laura Lochner, Mark Etherton, Marshall Steinbaum, Martha S. Jones, Michael Gorodiloff, Mitchell Oxford, Richard D. Brown, Rod, Rosa, Stephen Campbell, and Victoria Johnson, as well as Andrew Jackson's Hermitage​ in Nashville, TN.

The first Documents in Detail session for the 17-18 school year took place on 30 August 2017, with a discussion of the Declaration of Independence. Among the many topics and questions discussed were Jefferson's idea of an "American Mind," the issue of Jefferson's authorship - which was no widely known for years after the document was written - and the many local declarations of independence, hundreds of which were written by towns, churches, and civic groups during the first half of 1776. The panelists fielded questions about the choice of Jefferson as the primary author and the input and impact of other delegates to the Second Continental Congress, and pointed out that Jefferson's use of Locke's ideas and language acted as "18th Century hyperlinks," which virtually any reader would recognize as important ideas, if not also as the works of John Locke. Also of interest was the discussion of the parts that were left out of the final, accepted draft and the first draft. This program could work well with students as well as teachers and anyone interested in learning more about why the document was written, what it meant, and what it still means. Books mentioned include Edmund Morgan's American Freedom, American Slavery, Jay Fliegelman's Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance, and Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf's "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of Imagination. Program archive page iTunes Podcast Podcast RSS The post Documents in Detail: Declaration of Independence appeared first on Teaching American History.

On January 5 at noon, Peter Onuf delivered a Banner Lecture entitled “The Private Jefferson: 'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs.'” "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Tracing Jefferson's philosophical development from youth to old age, historian Peter Onuf explores what he calls the "empire" of Jefferson's imagination—an expansive state of mind born of his origins in a slave society, his intellectual influences, and the vaulting ambition that propelled him into public life as a modern avatar of the Enlightenment who, at the same time, likened himself to a figure of old—"the most blessed of the patriarchs." Indeed, Jefferson saw himself as a "patriarch," not just to his country and mountain-like home at Monticello but also to his family, the white half that he loved so publicly, as well as to the black side that he claimed to love, a contradiction of extraordinary historical magnitude. Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Professor of History Emeritus and Senior Research Scholar at Monticello, is the author of “The State of the World: Thomas Jefferson’s Political Vision,” in the exhibition catalogue, The Private Jefferson: Perspectives from the Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the coauthor with Annette Gordon-Reed of “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. He is also a co-host (the “18th Century Guy”) of the popular public radio program and podcast BackStory with the American History Guys.

On May 20, 2010, Internationally renowned historians and hosts Edward Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf present "Paying Up: The History of Taxation." From the very beginning, Americans have been arguing about whether their taxes are fair and just. The American History Guys will explored taxation's complicated and turbulent history—from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Tea Party Movement of 2010—and discuss Americans' attitudes toward the Tax Man.(Introduction by Paul A. Levengood) The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed is an award-winning author and the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School. Dr. Peter S. Onus is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. They discuss in this episode their latest joint book, "'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs': Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination." Gordon-Reed and Onus spoke at the Washington Library's Michelle Smith Lecture Series on May 5, 2016.

Dr. Annette Gordon-Reed is an award-winning author and the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School. Dr. Peter S. Onus is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia. They discuss in this episode their latest joint book, "'Most Blessed of the Patriarchs': Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination." Gordon-Reed and Onus spoke at the Washington Library's Michelle Smith Lecture Series on May 5, 2016. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/mountvernon/message

In Episode 8 of The Way of Improvement Leads Home podcast John Fea and Drew Dyrli Hermeling talk about the complex life and legacy of Thomas Jefferson. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed and Jefferson scholar Peter Onuf talk with John about their new book, The Most Blessed of Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On November 21, 2011, Internationally renowned historians and hosts Edward Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf presented "Thanksgiving in American History." The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

On November 21, 2011, internationally renowned historians and hosts Edward Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf presented "Thanksgiving in American History." Exploring competing myths surrounding Thanksgiving’s origins, the American History Guys peeled back layers of tradition that have created the celebration that we know today. From Pilgrims, to turkey, to football games, to parade floats, the Guys offered surprising perspectives on the shaping of one our nation’s most beloved holidays. A special guest—who made a case for Virginia’s claim on Thanksgiving’s roots— also joined the Guys.(Introduction by Paul A. Levengood)

Peter Onuf, David Hendrickson, and Karl Friedrich-Walling

Peter Onuf, David Hendrickson, and Karl Friedrich-Walling

On May 20, 2010, Internationally renowned historians and hosts Edward Ayers, Brian Balogh, and Peter Onuf present "Paying Up: The History of Taxation." From the very beginning, Americans have been arguing about whether their taxes are fair and just. The American History Guys will explored taxation's complicated and turbulent history—from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Tea Party Movement of 2010—and discuss Americans' attitudes toward the Tax Man. (Introduction by Paul A. Levengood)