Today, we bring you an episode focusing on Thomas Jefferson, the driver. As Emilie Johnson, Associate Curator at Monticello, notes, Jefferson might have been a dangerous driver at that.

Today, we bring you an episode focusing on Thomas Jefferson, the driver. As Emilie Johnson, Associate Curator at Monticello, notes, Jefferson might have been a dangerous driver at that.

For this edition of Mountaintop History, we’ll hear different members of the Monticello guide staff share some of their favorite quotes from history and why they’re favorites. Plus, we introduce a new host for Mountaintop History, Olivia Brown!

Monticello's Kyle Chattleton discusses one of the few moments in Monticello’s history where an enslaved individual was freed by Jefferson. We can only imagine Robert Hemings’s feelings after being released from Jefferson on Christmas Eve 1794, but historical documents show that Jefferson was not too happy about the manumission.

On October 3, 1825, in what he later described as a "most painful event," Thomas Jefferson appeared before a gathering of students, professors, and trustees at the University of Virginia inside its now-famed Rotunda. Recent unruly student behavior had culminated in an attack on two professors with bricks and canes and threats by faculty to resign. Open less than a year, the university Jefferson had conceived, designed, and championed through Virginia’s legislature — the institution he called “the hobby of my old age” — was suddenly in jeopardy.

In this latest episode of our “In the Course of Human Events” podcast, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, the Saunders Director at Monticello’s Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies and author of 'The Illimitable Freedom of the Human Mind:' Thomas Jefferson’s Idea of a University," narrates the story with help from colleagues Ann Lucas and Aaron Ojalvo.

In the midst of the election of 1800, presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson wrote a very personal and intriguing document where he asks himself what if any value he has offered to his country through public service. In this podcast, Monticello Guide Kyle Chattleton speaks with fellow Guide and House Tour Supervisor Danna Kelley about this document and Jefferson's answer to his own question.

The Monticello mountaintop has seen many trees over the centuries. But there were two trees in particular that greeted visitors at Monticello for hundreds of years. On this episode of Mountaintop History, Monticello guide Kyle Chattleton tells the story of Monticello's pair of tulip poplars.

Diplomatic protocol. These days it’s all written down and governed by rules and long-standing conventions. But in 1801, when he became President, Jefferson wondered whether the new Republican system of government didn't call for a new more democratic model of diplomatic behavior. Monticello's Gaye Wilson -- with help from Monticello guide Dianne Pierce and Monticello Teacher Institute participant Kristi Robinson -- relates how Jefferson once tested the limits of protocol and describes some of the straining effects it had on diplomatic relations at home and abroad.

Since 1997, Monticello's archaeologists have identified over twenty previously unrecorded plantation sites. In this interview conducted in 2005, Sara Bon-Harper, then-Archaeological Research Manager at Monticello, explains how archaeological sites are identified and describes discoveries at Site 8, a settlement of slaves active from the 1770s to the 1790s.

The Hamilton musical has helped popularize early American history, and one of the most famous numbers from the musical details a compromise between Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. In this episode of Mountaintop History, Monticello Guide Kyle Chattleton talks about "The Room Where It Happens" and the "Compromise of 1790."