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- Title
The Natural History Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in Notes on the State of Virginia.
- Authors
GRAVES, DANIEL A.
- Abstract
For evidence that Jefferson was reading theEngclopédie at the time he was writing Notes. seeThomas Jefferson, "From Thomas Jefferson to JohnFitzgerald, 27 February 1781", in Boyd et al., Papers ofThomas, Jefferson, 5:15; Sowerby, Catalogue of theLibrary of Thomas Jefferson, 5:150; Douglas L. Wilson,"Jefferson and the Republic of Letters", in JeffersonianLegacies, ed. For an introduction to Jefferson'sviews on natural history and anthropology, see KeithThomson, A Passion for Nature: Thomas Jefferson andNatural History (Charlottesville, Va., 2008); KeithThomson, Jefferson's Shadow: The Story of His Science(New Haven, Conn., 2012). In Query VI and XIV of his Notes on the State ofVirginia, Thomas Jefferson inserted himself into ascientific Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. I disagree with Charles A. Miller'sportrayal of Jefferson as a monogenist and agree with AriHelo's view that he did not hold a fixed opinion on thequestion of human diversity (see Charles A. Miller,Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation [Baltimore,1988], 56-87; Ari Helo, Thomas Jefferson's Ethics and thePolitics of Human Progress [New York, 2014], 46-77). Jefferson nevertheless categorized allancient slaves as whites" based upon his limitedunderstanding of the relevant literary sources and theirhistorical context.33 Whether or not he was conscious of this factual error,Jefferson drew on classical examples in Query XIV topersuade his readers to adopt his views on naturalhistory, not to give an accurate account of slavery inancient Greece, Rome, and modern America.
- Subjects
VIRGINIA; NATURAL history; ANCIENT history; SCIENTISTS' attitudes; AFRICAN Americans; SCIENTIFIC knowledge
- Publication
Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 2023, Vol 131, Issue 2, p91
- ISSN
0042-6636
- Publication type
Article