Alan Pell Crawford

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Alan Pell Crawford (born 1953) is an American author and journalist who, in his books and articles, has written on the period of the United States' founding and, in a recent departure, published How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain.

Contents

His previous book, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, a Washington Post best-seller, casts new light on the retirement of the nation’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence. [1]

Career

A journalist and political analyst, a former U.S. Senate speechwriter and congressional press secretary, [2] Crawford is also a public speaker, who has spoken at the Union Club of the City of New York, [3] Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C., [4] and the Virginia Center for History and Culture, [5] as well as historical societies and book groups, and been interviewed on the Motley Fool podcast, [6] and Biographers International Organization podcast, [7] as well as Coast to Coast AM. [8] Crawford has been a resident scholar at George Washington’s Mount Vernon, [9] at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello [10] and at the Boston Athenaeum. [11]

His articles, essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , [12] The Washington Post'', [13] the Nation, National Review , [14] and the Weekly Standard . [15]

Crawford first came to national attention in 1977, with an article in The Nation , entitled "Richard Viguerie’s Bid for Power." The first major investigative reporting on the self-described New Right in American politics, the article drew on Crawford’s own experience in Washington’s emerging “conservative movement.” “Richard Viguerie’s Bid for Power” was expanded in book form in Thunder on the Right: The ‘New Right’ and the Politics of Resentment, Crawford’s first book, published in 1980. [16]

Crawford wrote his second book about Ann Cary Randolph Morris entitled Unwise Passions: The True Story of a Remarkable Woman and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America, published in 2000, using sources from archives throughout the United States. His third book, Twilight at Monticello, published in 2008, also drew on primary sources to cast new light on the debt-ridden retirement of Thomas Jefferson. [17] The post-presidential years were also those in which Jefferson’s views on a range of important questions—on the nature of constitutional government, on the institution of slavery and on the future of the American experiment in self-government—underwent significant changes. [18] The Associated Press stated that in the Twilight at Monticello Crawford “had access to thousands of family letters—some previously unexamined by historians—that he used to create his portrait of the complex idealist, [and] there are some surprising tidbits to be found.” [19]

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Thomas Jefferson was an American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and Founding Father who served as the third president of the United States from 1801 to 1809. Among the Committee of Five charged by the Second Continental Congress with drafting the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was the document's primary author. Following the American Revolutionary War and prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson was the first U.S. secretary of state under George Washington and then the nation's second vice president under John Adams.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Monticello</span> Primary residence of U.S. president Thomas Jefferson

Monticello was the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, a Founding Father and the third president of the United States, who began designing Monticello after inheriting land from his father at age 14. Located just outside Charlottesville, Virginia, in the Piedmont region, the plantation was originally 5,000 acres (20 km2), with Jefferson using the labor of African slaves for extensive cultivation of tobacco and mixed crops, later shifting from tobacco cultivation to wheat in response to changing markets. Due to its architectural and historic significance, the property has been designated a National Historic Landmark. In 1987, Monticello and the nearby University of Virginia, also designed by Jefferson, were together designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The current nickel, a United States coin, features a depiction of Monticello on its reverse side.

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<i>The Hemingses of Monticello</i> 2008 book by Annette Gordon-Reed

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family is a 2008 book by American historian Annette Gordon-Reed. It recounts the history of four generations of the African-American Hemings family, from their African and Virginia origins until the 1826 death of Thomas Jefferson, their master and the father of Sally Hemings' children.

This article includes information on the African heritage of presidents of the United States, together with information on unsubstantiated claims that certain presidents of the United States had African ancestry.

Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, owned more than 600 slaves during his adult life. Jefferson freed two slaves while he lived, and five others were freed after his death, including two of his children from his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. His other two children with Hemings were allowed to escape without pursuit. After his death, the rest of the slaves were sold to pay off his estate's debts.

Harriet Hemings was born into slavery at Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States, in the first year of his presidency. Most historians believe her father was Jefferson, who is now believed to have fathered, with his slave Sally Hemings, four children who survived to adulthood.

The bibliography of Thomas Jefferson refers to published works about Thomas Jefferson, the primary author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. Biographical and political accounts for Jefferson now span across three centuries.

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The Thomas Jefferson Foundation, originally known as the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, is a private, nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation founded in 1923 to purchase and maintain Monticello, the primary plantation of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States. The Foundation's initial focus was on architectural preservation, with the goal of restoring Monticello as close to its original appearance as possible. It has since grown to include other historic and cultural pursuits and programs such as its Annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony. It also publishes and provides a center for scholarship on Jefferson and his era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ann Cary Randolph Morris</span>

Ann Cary Randolph Morris (1774–1837) was the daughter of Thomas Mann Randolph Sr. and the wife of Gouverneur Morris. Books have been written about the scandal in which she was embroiled in central Virginia as a young woman after the death of her fiance. After she married Gouverneur Morris in New York, she regained much of her favorable social prominence until he died in 1816. She was devoted to their son, Gouverneur Morris Jr. (1813–1888), whom she called her "richest treasure.” They lived at Morrisania. He had the St. Ann's Episcopal Church in Bronx built in her memory.

References

  1. "Alan Pell Crawford - Penguin Random House". www.randomhouse.com.
  2. "The Essentials: Five Books on Thomas Jefferson".
  3. "Weekend Reading: How Not to Get Rich". December 2017.
  4. "Alan Pell Crawford - How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain".
  5. "Jefferson, Paine, and Monroe: The American Revolution's Authentic Revolutionaries".[ permanent dead link ]
  6. "The Financial Foibles of Mark Twain".
  7. "Podcast Episode #4 – Alan Pell Crawford". Archived from the original on 2019-05-10. Retrieved 2019-05-10.
  8. "Alan Pell Crawford".
  9. "An acclaimed Richmond author takes up residence at George Washington's home".
  10. "Fellows: 1995-2019".
  11. "Past Fellows".
  12. "Railbirds Are All the Same, Even Long-Lost Russian Counts".
  13. "A House Called Bizarre". The Washington Post. 2000-11-26.
  14. "Righteous Rebel". 2009-01-21.
  15. "Out With The In-Crowd". 1999-02-15.
  16. Herbers, John (1981-06-27). "EXTREME AND PURE". The New York Times.
  17. "Twilight at Monticello by Alan Pell Crawford". 2008-02-24.
  18. "Bookmarks". The Wall Street Journal. 18 January 2008 via www.wsj.com.
  19. Archived 2018-06-29 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading