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Notes on video lecture:
Thomas Jefferson in Historical Perspective
Notes taken by Edward Tanguay on February 19, 2014 (go to class or lectures)
Choose from these words to fill the blanks below:
future, legitimate, body, inferior, author, progress, history, unequal, government, world, Enlightenment
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how people in America and around the            see Thomas Jefferson
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what most people know about him is that he is the              of the Declaration of Independence
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the creation of a new American nation was an important event in world history
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Jefferson's understanding of                that is crucial to our understanding of Jefferson
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he sees the revolution in the context of the                  of mankind
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he is a child of the Age of                           
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the beginning of a time when it began to be possible to understand things at a deeper and more accurate way, to unlock nature's secrets in a way that had never been done before, to predict, project, and shape the              of the world
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the Enlightenment was succeeding on several fronts
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scientific enlightenment
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philosophical enlightenment
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one aspect that remained unchanged by the Enlightenment was                     , the fundamental issue of how people would organize and govern themselves
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for Jefferson, this would change on July 4th, 1776, it was going to be a new world
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when they imagine a new world, the compare to the old world against which they compare their experiment, as they called it
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an experimental revolution in political science
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common sense of the time:
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all men were created               
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you can't have a society if you don't have order, and order implies hierarchy
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society is like a         , and there must be a brain at the top which controls all other parts
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Thomas Jefferson
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you might have lived under a monarchy, and you may have felt yourself                  to those who rode by on high horses, but think: are you made any different than them, or was it just their happenstance of being born in the right place at the right time into the right family
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the belief in "all men are created equal" changes everything that has to do with government
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the belief in this statement changed the world
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*** for a government to be                     , it has to come from the people, it has to be their government
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even the events at the end of 1989 seemed to be a living out of what Jefferson said two centuries prior

Ideas and Concepts:

On the universal applicability of the early American political experiment, via this morning's Age of Jefferson class: "There is a paradox in the exceptionalism of the United States that Jefferson pushes as a visionary and progressive leader, since the very exceptionalism that applied only to the United States as a nation breaking away from its European monarchical past ultimately will give way to universalism, because if a group of men can set up a radically new kind of self-governed nation based on government by the people for the people, and if they can get this experiment to succeed, then it can succeed for peoples anywhere in the world."
Thomas Jefferson in Historical Perspective