A conversation with Jane Kamensky
Monticello has always stood as both a symbol of America’s promise and a reminder of its contradictions. For historian Jane Kamensky, Thomas Jefferson’s mountaintop home is also a vast, wide-reaching classroom.
Before coming to Monticello, Kamensky was most recently the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard and director of the Schlesinger Library, where she earned national recognition for her vivid, prizewinning histories of early America. Now, as president and CEO of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation—the organization that owns and operates Monticello—she is bringing that same scholarly lens to Monticello.
Kamensky is leading the ongoing efforts to ensure that Monticello is not only a historic site, but also a place for civic learning, courageous conversations, and deeper engagement with the ideas that shaped the nation. In this conversation, Kamensky reflects on Monticello’s evolving role, the preparations for America’s 250th anniversary this year, and why this local treasure and UNESCO World Heritage Site is one of the most important places in the country to think about the country’s past and future.
Q: What made this the right moment for you to come to Monticello?
Jane Kamensky: I think it was a confluence of two things. One, I had been in the classroom for 31 years, and I was looking at a time of consequence—even peril—for the country and thinking about how my skills as a historian and teacher could best be used in service of the United States.
Monticello is a really big classroom. We serve more than 300,000 history-curious people every year with content that is at once honest, rigorous, and inspirational. The pull of being able to do civic education at scale was really powerful.
The other factor was the 250th anniversary itself. I started thinking about where the best place in the country might be to tell a true story of our history at a moment of generational curiosity about the founding and how it plays out today. Both of those roads led to Jefferson’s mountaintop.
Q: Since arriving a couple of years ago, what has most impressed or surprised you about Monticello?
Kamensky: I knew it was a place that had done great work for a generation or more, but the depth of excellence and purpose in the staff continues to impress me. It’s an incredibly mission-driven workforce of about 380 people. Whether you’re talking to someone who leads tours, conducts scholarship, replants the mountaintop vineyard, or cleans the visitor center, there is a level of passion about the mission and its significance that I’ve never encountered before.
Charlottesville itself has also been a learning experience. The generational attachment to place—the rootedness in home, history, and family stories among people from all walks of life—is very different from my experience in the Northeast. That’s been wonderful to see.
Q: Community connections are important to you and to Monticello. How are you strengthening those ties locally?
Kamensky: Our new strategic plan, Climb the Mountain, Discover America, articulates two overarching and connected goals: Monticello as and for America, and Monticello for Virginia.
We want to be a place that people who live in the area feel attached to and passionate about as visitors, supporters, and believers in this mission. That means getting Monticello off the mountain as well as inviting our neighbors to join us.
We’ve been building partnerships with institutions like Piedmont Virginia Community College, which has been an increasingly vital partner. We’re also working closely with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, which shares our commitment to telling the stories of people of African descent and the intertwined histories of slavery and freedom in this place.
And of course there are many partnerships with UVA and with people and organizations in the region who care deeply about the rural landscape and sustainability. The most formal connection with UVA is the annual Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medals, which recognize achievements in law, architecture, citizen leadership, and global innovation.
I also hold a courtesy faculty appointment at UVA, and we’ve talked about teaching a January-term course. Recently we worked with the architecture school on what was called the World Heritage Trail Studio, thinking about how to intervene lightly on the landscape so people might once again walk from UVA to Monticello as they did in Jefferson’s time. There are many points of partnership, and I’d like to bring some of those together more tightly in the future.
Q: Many locals have already visited Monticello. Why should they visit again now?
Kamensky: There’s an awful lot that’s new. That includes programming, galleries, restoration work inside the house, and changes to the landscape itself.
Right now we’re finishing the mountaintop accessibility project, which will transform the pathways up to the mountaintop. We also have a vibrant series that brings historians, scholars, and public-history leaders to Monticello regularly.
We have three new galleries that are now open: the orientation gallery “Many Threads, One Story,” the Griffin Discovery Room for families, and a new 1776 gallery that features an engraving of the Declaration once owned by James Madison. We’re also developing a couple of incredible new tours and expanding access to more of the landscape.
We’re building a variety of experiences so that someone from Charlottesville could come back monthly, or even weekly, and encounter something new. We’re also developing a membership program to encourage people who walk the Saunders-Monticello Trail to continue up to the mountaintop and experience Monticello’s gardens and landscape.
Q: As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, what role does Monticello play in that commemoration?
Kamensky: The semiquincentennial marks the birth of the United States at the moment that the Declaration of Independence was signed. As the T-shirt in our gift shop reminds people, “Our guy wrote it.”
So we’re digging deeply into that vision statement of what the United States as one people stands for, and looking at the generations of Americans who have worked to fulfill Jefferson’s vision of a people created equal with inalienable rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We’re presenting a theatrical experience in which our first-person interpreter of Jefferson, Bill Barker, reflects on the season of the Declaration in different rooms of the house.
Beyond July Fourth, we’re hosting a robust series of programs around the theme of founders—not only the founding generation, but Americans today as founders and re-founders of the republic. And we’re pairing that with fun programs like Culinary Diplomacy events and “Feast of Reason,” conversations that encourage thoughtful dialogue about why the 250-year experiment in American self government is worth preserving and sustaining.
Q: Monticello tells the story of Jefferson as a founding father and the author of the Declaration, but also the story of the hundreds of people he enslaved. How does the institution hold those truths together?
Kamensky: I love the way you put that—holding those truths together. And there’s actually a third truth. Jefferson was the philosopher of liberty, he enslaved more than 600 people over the course of his life, and Jefferson also loathed the institution of slavery.
A major goal is to understand how all of those things went together. As a preservation and education institution, we aim to restore this place and tell its story in a way that brings visitors as close as possible to the world of the founding era.
Jefferson knew those contradictions existed. My colleague Gayle Jessup White often says she’s interested in the ways enslaved people “freed Jefferson,” how their labor allowed him to be a philosopher king, living a life of books and the global, cosmopolitan life of the mind. At the same time, people who were enslaved at Monticello and their descendants did tremendous and heroic work to realize the vision of the Declaration of Independence.
Telling those intertwined stories helps restore a more coherent fabric of the past, especially in the period after Jefferson’s retirement, which is the era we interpret here.
Q: You’ve spoken about “courageous conversations” at Monticello. What do those look like in practice?
Kamensky: Our “Founding Friends, Founding Foes” tour is a good example. It centers on the contentious political relationship between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. As we tell that story, guests realize that most of what they fought over in the 1790s through the 1820s are still fault lines in American politics today.
One point we emphasize is that division is a feature, not a bug, of constitutional democracy. It’s been there since the beginning because the founders disagreed fiercely. What we need is not to imagine that there will be a time when we stop disagreeing about some of these tension points in the life of what is now the world’s oldest democracy. Instead, we can learn to disagree productively, and to build coalition with people who can help us move forward on one issue, even if we disagree on another.
Jefferson himself was a passionate advocate of freedom of speech. He famously said that if given a choice between newspapers without a government or a government without newspapers, he would choose newspapers every time, even though he was often the target of really heated newspaper politics.
We hang a lot on Jefferson’s injunction to follow the truth wherever it may lead, and to allow error airtime as long as reason is left free to combat it. So this is a place to talk about difficult questions.
Q: At a moment when the country feels particularly divided, what role can Monticello play in strengthening civic understanding?
Kamensky: Civic educators often talk about braiding three things together: content knowledge, civic skills, and civic virtues.
We share rigorous and nuanced historical content about the early history of the United States and the way that that has played out over 250 years. We model civic skills—how to engage in civil disagreement, how to evaluate evidence, and how you know what you know. And ultimately we hope to cultivate civic virtues: empathy, grace, and the ability to hold contradictory ideas in your mind at the same time.
One visitor commented after taking the “Founding Friends, Founding Foes” tour that they felt motivated to seek out someone who disagreed with them and try to understand their perspective. If 300,000 visitors take that spirit home and share it with others, I would love to be able to scale that and reach the whole country with that call to virtue and curiosity.
Q: What do you hope visitors take away from Monticello during the 250th anniversary?
Kamensky: At our Mountaintop Activities Center, we often have a station where young visitors try writing with a quill pen. One child wrote “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and you could see her struggling with the quill, which is a really tough technology. At the end she writes: “P.S. This is hard.”
I think that captures what I hope people take away: an appreciation for the difficult work of creating this nation, and a sense of their own ongoing responsibility in doing this hard thing. That we’re all in this work together, that it needs all of our talents, our charity, our engagement, and our unique and often warring perspectives. That it will never be perfect, but that together we can make it more perfect.