The Other Declarations

Jeremy D. Bailey is Professor of Humanities at the Hamilton School at the University of Florida and formerly held the Sanders Chair in Law and Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. Among many books, he is the author of Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power and The Idea of Presidential Representation: An Intellectual and Political History.

"Jeremy Bailey's insightful analysis uncovers the multitudinous ways Thomas Jefferson leveraged public addresses, legislation, letters, and other documents to plant the seeds of Revolutionary republicanism and representative democracy. Jefferson had faith in the power of words to propagate America's founding principles and spread the 'happy influence of reason and liberty over the face of the earth.'"-Robert M. S. McDonald, author of Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson's Image in His Own Time "Well done, very well-written, well-informed, well-grounded in the history and scholarship. It should be of interest to the general reader as well as the scholar in this 250th anniversary year."-Michael Zuckert, coauthor of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and the Founding of America "What does it mean to be a people? Americans traditionally look back to the Declaration of Independence to answer that question. We should also listen to what Thomas Jefferson had to say in the many Other Declarations Jeremy Bailey brings to our attention in his important and illuminating new book. From the very beginning, nationhood has been a work-in-progress, Bailey's Jefferson teaches us, the elusive, necessarily imperfect 'union of sentiment' the third president envisioned in his Second Inaugural Address. The Other Declarations: Thomas Jefferson and the Language of American Democracy is essential reading at yet another critical moment in our national history."-Peter S. Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Virginia, coauthor of Thomas Jefferson Survives: American Independence in His Time and Ours