This week, Clay Jenkinson discusses Jefferson’s first inaugural address with regular guest Lindsay Chervinsky. The speech, inaudibly delivered on March 4, 1801, is regarded as one of the top five in American history. After a hotly contested election, Jefferson was able to say, “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Part utopian vision for America, part political theater, part endorsement of the strength and durability of a republican form of government, the first inaugural address was one of the handful of Jefferson’s greatest written statements.  Download the full episode here ..read more

This week, Clay Jenkinson interviews frequent guest Beau Breslin of Skidmore College about the most famous decision in Supreme Court history. One William Marbury sued the US Government for not installing him into a post to which he had been appointed by outgoing President John Adams. Marshall could not find a way to get Marbury his job, but he did declare that the Supreme Court was the final arbiter of the Constitution, that it emphatically had the duty of determining which laws were constitutional and which were unconstitutional. Beau Breslin helps Clay sort out this monumental decision of 18 ..read more

Professor Beau Breslin of Skidmore College returns to the Thomas Jefferson Hour to talk about important passages that were edited out of key American documents of the Founding Era, including the famous anti-slavery passage of the Declaration of Independence. How would America have been different if Jefferson’s attack on the slave trade had been included in the birth certificate of America. Clay and Beau also discuss the congratulatory letter to President-elect John Adams that Jefferson wrote but Madison persuaded him not to send. John Dickinson tried to include in the original Articles of Conf ..read more

This week's episode of the Thomas Jefferson Hour was recorded live at Radford University in Radford, Virginia in February 2023.  Download the full episode here ..read more

This week, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky about the 28th President of the United States Woodrow Wilson. Best known for his Fourteen Points and the League of Nations, Wilson was one of the most pronounced idealists among American presidents. He said he wanted to make the world safe for democracy. Meanwhile, at home, he supported some of the most repressive censorship and anti-dissident programs in the history of America. He re-segregated the U.S. government bureaucracy and came late to women’s suffrage. Before the end of his second term, Wilson had a massive stroke. H ..read more

This week, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with Dr. Edward Watts, professor of history at the University of California San Diego. Watts, the author of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny, is a historian of the classical world or more than 2000 years ago, but his work inevitably asks the question, is the American republic in the kind of chaos and decline that led to the collapse of the Roman Republic about the time of Christ? Was the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, a harbinger of greater and more purposeful uses of political violence in our future? How much public corruptio ..read more

This week, Clay Jenkinson’s conversation with Dr. Grant Zazula, a Yukon paleontologist. Nothing seemed to have fascinated Thomas Jefferson more than the mammoth and the mastodon, to the point that his detractors ridiculed his obsession. Jefferson convinced Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to dig up mastodon bones at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. Grant Zazula has had spectacular success gathering mammoth bones exposed by placer gold mining in the Yukon. Most recently, he was able to collect an intact mummified baby mammoth, which delighted and stunned the paleontological community. Clay had the op ..read more

This week, Clay Jenkinson and Lindsay Chervinsky discuss the first great First Lady in American history, Dolley Madison. Topics include her attitudes towards race and slavery, her sixteen years as the principal social arbiter and hostess in the new capital in Washington, DC, her relationship with Jefferson and her husband's amazing friendship and collaboration with Jefferson. Plus, of course, that great moment when she refused to leave the White House without the Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington. Download the full episode here ..read more

This week, Clay Jenkinson has a conversation with Dr. Kevin Gutzman, Professor of History at Western Connecticut State University and author of The Jeffersonians: The Visionary Presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe held the presidency between 1800 and 1824. These three close friends and Virginia neighbors pursued a common set of public holidays. They managed to extinguish the Federalist Party and by the time Monroe began his second term, a Boston newspaper called it The Era of Good Feelings. Clay and Dr. Gutzman explore the friendship and po ..read more

Guest host Catherine Jenkinson interviews Mr. Jefferson about addiction, alcoholism, and depression in the early American republic. Jefferson explains that there were no treatment programs in his time for either mental illness or addiction. The insane asylums of the time were unspeakably horrible. Jefferson was well aware of the problems of alcoholism, because his protege Meriwether Lewis descended into substance abuse in the aftermath of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; and Jefferson's grandson-in-law, Charles Bankhead, was a drunk who physically abused his wife Anne Cary Randolph Bankhead.&nb ..read more