A fitting announcement on Thomas Jefferson's birthday: Cambridge University Press has released
Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection (March 2017), by
Matthew Crow (Hobart and William Smith Colleges). Here's a description from the Press:
In this innovative book, historian Matthew Crow unpacks the legal and
political thought of Thomas Jefferson as a tool for thinking about
constitutional transformation, settler colonialism, and race and civic
identity in the era of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson's
practices of reading, writing, and collecting legal history grew out of
broader histories of early modern empire and political thought. As a
result of the peculiar ways in which he theorized and experienced the
imperial crisis and revolutionary constitutionalism, Jefferson came to
understand a republican constitution as requiring a textual, material
culture of law shared by citizens with the cultivated capacity to
participate in such a culture. At the center of the story in Thomas
Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, Crow concludes,
we find legal history as a mode of organizing and governing collective
memory, and as a way of instituting a particular form of legal
subjectivity.
A few blurbs:
'Matthew Crow's book is a dazzling achievement, deepening and
expanding our understanding of Jefferson's conception of the meaning of
his (and his nation's) past. Not only does it place his struggles with
slavery and nationhood in his own time and place, but it provides the
present with a cautionary guide to the self-reflection required of all
citizens.'
-- David Konig
'Matthew
Crow’s new book is a beautiful exploration of the shifts in Thomas
Jefferson’s thought. Crow gives not only a powerful account of
Jefferson’s philosophical understanding of civic membership but also the
psychology of his republicanism. This is a remarkable effort of
intellectual reconstruction and an essential contribution to scholarship
on the early American republic.'
-- Aziz Rana
More information is available
here.
