The writing about Jefferson that appeared in the 1980s both took new directions in response to political developments both in the United States and abroad and also continued lines of discourse that had been prominent in previous decades. The election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency of the United States and the country's general swing to the right made their impact upon Jefferson studies, particularly upon discussions of his notion of the appropriate relationship between church and state. The break-up of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union led to a reevaluation of Jefferson the bourgeois revolutionary as Jefferson the democratic hero. At the same time the dimensions and limits of whig ideology continued to occupy the attention of many scholars, and the specter of Sally Hemings conjured up by Fawn Brodie in the 1970s did not go away. The following paragraphs seek to present an overview of what seems to me to be the best--most significant? most suggestive?--work on Jefferson done in the last decade. The numbers in parentheses after each reference indicate the item's position in this bibliography.

A number of important developments in the publication of materials by Jefferson occurred in the 1980s. Volume 20 of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson appeared in 1982 from Princeton University Press (#68), and this marked the final work of Julian Boyd, whose magisterial editorship laid down standards for modern editing of historical texts. This volume contains his last long textual note, an increasingly prominent feature of his editorial practice which both illuminated the Jeffersonian text and retarded the publication of volumes in the series. Noble E. Cunningham takes an interesting overview in his essay "The Legacy of Julian Boyd" (#191). Boyd's successor, Charles T. Cullen, dropped the policy of including such long explanatory notes as well as Boyd's "file folder" practice of grouping documents related to a common topic in favor of a strict chronological presentation. The new policy begins in Volume 22 (#293), where the editors point out that this means they will print the documents Jefferson collected in the so-called "Anas" separately as they were written. Cullen has also brought computer editing techniques to bear on the Papers edition (see #82). He has now moved on to the Newberry Library, however, and John Catanzariti has replaced him as editor, effective with Volume 24 (#598).

The editors of the Papers also began an exciting new phase of their work with the publication of three volumes in a so-called "Second Series." This is intended to include longer documents more amenable to topical arrangement than to presentation in chronological order. The first of these appeared in 1983 as Jefferson's Extracts from the Gospels, edited by the late Dickinson W. Adams with an introduction by Eugene R. Sheridan (#124). Adams was able to reconstruct Jefferson's "Philosophy of Jesus" by consulting the two volumes from which he cut his extracts. By putting together the 1803 "Syllabus," the "Philosophy," and the final "Life and Morals of Jesus," along with relevant items of correspondence, the editors have created a documentary history of his developing religious opinions. Sheridan's historical introduction basically supplants all previous discussions of the subject. In 1988 appeared Jefferson's Parliamentary Writings, edited by Wilbur Samuel Howell (#468), which makes readily available the manuscript "Parliamentary Pocket-Book" and the subsequent printed text of Jefferson's Manual of Parliamentary Practice, the first congressional manual. While this will probably appeal to a smaller audience than the previous volume, it presents material that is yet to receive thorough and imaginative study. The 1989 publication of Douglas L. Wilson's edition of Jefferson's Literary Commonplace Book (#535) presents a text already known in Gilbert Chinard's 1928 edition, but this version gives a more accurate rendering of the text, extensive annotation, and, most important, an argument for dating the entries. The volumes in this "Second Series" offer extremely valuable sources both for scholars and for serious general readers. Promised but not yet printed at the time of writing this introduction is a two-volume edition of Jefferson's Memorandum Books, edited by James A. Bear, Jr.; these daily account and record books, not before readily available, promise to be one of the most valuable items in the whole series. When published, they should open a new era in Jefferson scholarship.

Other significant presentations of Jefferson's writing in the 1980's include Merrill Peterson's 1984 Library of America volume, Thomas Jefferson: Writings; this 1,600 page collection is not listed in this bibliography because it has neither a separate introduction nor an extensive scholarly apparatus. It does have some useful notes, however, as well as a chronology of Jefferson's life, and it presents the very best one-volume collection of Jefferson's writings we have. This ought to be on the ready reference shelf of anyone interested in Jefferson. In 1983 the University Press of Virginia reprinted Millicent Sowerby's monumental five-volume Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, and this in turn sparked two important review essays by James Gilreath (#198) and Douglas L. Wilson (#233) which point both to the achievement and to the limitations of Sowerby's work. Gilreath and Wilson collaborated in 1989 on editing Thomas Jefferson's Library: A Catalog with the Entries in His Own Order (#530), presenting an 1823 manuscript list of the books in the great library as prepared by Nicholas Trist, Jefferson's private secretary. This is a more revealing document than the only previously available list, that prepared by the Librarian of Congress who received the books originally. Wilson's essay "Jefferson's Library" (#372) grows out of his scholarship on Jefferson's reading and is the best brief overview of his interest in and acquisition of books.

The great event in biographical writing about Jefferson was surely Dumas Malone's completion of his six-volume Jefferson and His Times. The 1981 appearance of Malone's Sage of Monticello (#10) sparked a round of testimonial and critical reviews of the whole six-volume project by Merrill Peterson (#101), Edwin M. Yoder (#110), and others. Anne Freudenberg's interview with Malone (#11) will also be interesting to anyone wishing to consider Malone's craft as a biographer. Malone's achievement notwithstanding, a number of other biographical projects of some importance emerged in the 1980s. Noble E. Cunningham's In Pursuit of Reason (#378) offered itself as a one-volume biography, and although it is by no means one-sided, it tends to speak more fully about TJ's engagement in public life. Elizabeth Langhorne's Monticello: A Family Story (#383), on the other hand, offers an entertaining and often suggestive account of Jefferson's family life and is notable for the attention paid to the lives of the servants, including the Hemings family. Virginius Dabney attempted to reply to Fawn Brodie's claim that the Callender scandals reflected the actual situation at Monticello, but his rather shrill The Jefferson Scandals: A Rebuttal (#4) fails to give any clear picture of the real position of the Hemings children and their mother. Insofar as there are facts to do this, Langhorne's book is the best, readily available treatment of this, although shadowed by a certain sentimentalizing of the situation. (James A. Bear, Jr.'s "The Hemings Family of Monticello," Virginia Cavalcade, Autumn, 1979, should also be consulted by anyone who has access to this periodical.) Jan Lewis's stimulating exercise in social history, The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson's Virginia (#121), treats Jefferson and his family members in passing, but it will be of considerable interest to anyone trying to understand the dynamics of the Monticello community. Alf J. Mapp, Jr.'s Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity (#385) purports to reveal an overlooked Jefferson but has in fact nothing new to say.

Silvio A. Bedini's Thomas Jefferson: Statesman of Science (#593) takes a different perspective by presenting a biography of Jefferson centered on his interest in science, and Jack McLaughlin's Jefferson and Monticello: The Biography of a Builder (#465) uses a similar strategy of focusing a biographical narrative on a particular interest, here on Jefferson's ongoing construction of his house over nearly five decades. A different solution to the problem of capturing the polymathic Jefferson in one volume comes in Thomas Jefferson: A Reference Biography (#294), edited by Merrill Peterson, which gives room to twenty-five experts on Jefferson to develop their various areas of expertise. Steven H. Hochman's authoritative Ph.D. dissertation, "Thomas Jefferson: A Personal Financial Biography" (#380), looks at how Jefferson's handling of his personal business affairs and his increasingly difficult problems with debt shaped his life. Roger Bruns's Thomas Jefferson (#285) is a good juvenile biography, and Natalie Bober's Thomas Jefferson: Man on a Mountain (#460) is also readable, although with some problems of treatment. The changing political situation in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union led to several biographical reconsiderations there which were less colored by the demands of doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist historiography. Thus in 1984 two studies appeared in Poland, Zofia Libiszowska's biographical Tomasz Jefferson (#175) and Izabella Rusinowa's more strictly political study, Jefferson a Poczatki Amerykanskiego Systemu Partyinego [Jefferson and the Formation of the American Party System] (#178). The change in Soviet thinking can be observed to an extent by comparing Vladimir Pechatnov's Gamilton i Dzhefferson [Hamilton and Jefferson] (#177) to Vladimir Sogrin's Dzhefferson: Chelovek, Myslitel, Politik [Jefferson: Man, Thinker, Man of Politics] (#538); the earlier work compares two bourgeois theorists while the later title claims to explore Jefferson's rich intellectual and spiritual world as a democratic thinker.