Previously Featured Topics
The style of the demand admitted but one answer. I sent a small squadron of frigates into the Mediterranean.
—First Annual Message to Congress, December 8, 1801 {More}
Thomas Jefferson and the pirates:
A model decision? {3}
It has been over two hundred years since President Jefferson sent U.S. Navy ships to the Mediterranean to deal with the perenniel threat of pirates disrupting international trade. And yet, it all sounds familiar. Pirates off the coast of Africa. An American ship attacked. A captain held hostage. U. S. warships dispatched to the area. A Bainbridge sailing into the thick of things, this time to the rescue.
Then, however, Jefferson also sent U.S. Marines overland to attack the pirates’ backers in Tripoli, a strategy that ultimately helped lead the way to a treaty and the end of piracy against American shipping. In a recent commentary for CNN, Retired Major General Tom Wilkerson recommended the “Jefferson model”, and says the better answer is to “Take on the pirates where they are . . . attack them at their home bases.” Is Jefferson’s example the right one to follow? Or, is the daring rescue by U.S. Navy Seals that left three pirates dead enough to protect America’s interests. What do you think?
Jefferson, Obama, and the Problem of Piracy - A Scholar’s View {0}
It is a rare thing for historians of early American foreign policy to see their subject discussed on national cable outlets. In the mid-1990s, when I first began my research on the Barbary War, the last major study of the subject had sat on library shelves for nearly 60 years and to have called the conflict a footnote in Jefferson scholarship would have generous. As late as October 2008, when a conference that I co-chaired touched on the issue of Jefferson’s Mediterranean War, the notion that American foreign policy could be preoccupied with tales of maritime heroism and hostage-taking would have seemed bizarre. The fact that the daring rescue of Captain Phillips was conducted on the deck of a warship named after William Bainbridge, whose career blossomed in Jefferson’s fight against Tripoli and Algiers, only added to the excitement and irony. More »
It is incumbent on every generation to pay it’s own debts as it goes.
—Thomas Jefferson to Destutt de Tracy, 26 December 1820 {More}
On the problem of national debt:
…all men are created equal…
—Declaration of Independence, 1776 {More}
On the election of America's first African-American president:
A nation, by establishing a character of liberality and magnanimity, gains in the friendship and respect of others more than the worth of mere money.
—--Thomas Jefferson, Special Message, January 13, 1806 {More}
On America's role in the world:
Play by the rules {2}
Jefferson’s words deal with a current debate among scholars of international politics — namely, the relative merits of “hard” and “soft” power. For realists, all that really matters is military economic strength. Jefferson, and many analysts who have seen the limits of America’s current unilateralist efforts to transform the Middle East by force, would argue [...]
Reputation of a nation {0}
The high hopes so often expressed in the context of Barack Obama’s recent election echo the expectations that many Americans had when Jefferson was elected President in 1801. One observer noted, no doubt with a touch of irony, that “a political millennium [...] was about to happen in the United States. The millennium was to [...]
