Slavery at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello

Lucia Stanton, senior historian of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, has been studying and writing about Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved community for more than 30 years. In this program, she argues that the President sometimes treated his slaves as human beings, and other times as property. Using thousands of documents and records kept by the third president, Stanton attempts to imagine what life was like from the point of view of the slaves.

Lucia Stanton is joined by historian Dianne Swann-Wright to discuss their ongoing oral history project that has collected the stories of 170 descendents of Monticello’s enslaved community. This program is about an hour and twenty minutes. close