Thomas Jefferson died 186 years ago. But J. Jefferson Looney still wants the nation's third president to speak for himself.
The Monticello historian has spent more than a quarter-century deciphering, annotating and publishing thousands of Jefferson's letters precisely as they were written, including eccentric spellings ("knolege"), obscure capitalizations and musings on slavery, God and death.
Looney's work is part of an audacious, multimillion-dollar memorial to some of the nation's most prominent Founding Fathers: an attempt to track down and publish an exhaustive collection of all of the significant correspondence and other documents written by — and sent to — George Washington, John Adams, Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin.