New York artist Mairia Kalman gets a jump on American Independence Day with a visit to Monticello, home of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father whose brilliant contributions to democracy are honored mostly in the breech. The New York Times published her multimedia account today.  Hat tip: Sarah Cooper-Ellis. If you want to understand this country and its people and what it means to be optimistic and complex and tragic and wrong and courageous you need to go to his home in Virginia. Monticello...

26 June, 2009