Jefferson book is reissued by professor

A new edition of the only book ever written and published by Thomas Jefferson in his lifetime--a geographic text that doubled as a philosophical tract on a broad range of 18th century issues--has been published by College English professor Frank Shuffelton. He has studied and researched the third U.S. president for more than two decades.

Notes on the State of Virginia was compiled in response to a French official's query about the state's plant and animal life, landscape, and institutions. Jefferson also sowed the text with observations on politics, science, religion, American identity, slavery, and race, showing the complex character that continues to fascinate historians and the general populace today.

The most recent edited version of the book appeared more than 40 years ago. But that edition inserted Jefferson's later revisions and presented a text that wouldn't have been familiar to his original readers, Shuffelton felt.

"The book was very influential from the time of its publication and through a good part of the 19th century," Shuffelton said. The 1954 edition, he explains, was a scholarly effort. However, by incorporating Jefferson's subsequent comments written in a personal copy, a book was created that would have been unfamiliar to most earlier readers. Instead, Shuffelton placed and identified those personal comments in end notes.

In addition, Jefferson's remarks and quotations in French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and Latin had been translated into English in the 1954 edition. Shuffelton retains Jefferson's use of foreign languages and offers translations in footnotes because, he says, it shows that the 18th century intellectual reading public was expected to know and understand other languages besides English and to be aware of a wider world.

Though filled with almost excruciating listings of geographic minutiae--from rainfall amounts to varying river depths to the size of native animal species--Notes on the State of Virginia also provided cultural and political commentary that provokes controversy to this day.