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Stephen Howard Browne, Jeffersonians in Power: The Rhetoric of Opposition Meets the Realities of Governing, Journal of American History, Volume 107, Issue 4, March 2021, Pages 996–997, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa539
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All students of Thomas Jefferson are students, too, of Peter S. Onuf. Over a long and extraordinarily productive career, Onuf has served as an exemplar of scholarly insight, judicious reckoning, and generosity of spirit. This much is widely acknowledged, and for these reasons he has received many honors. Surely Onuf will find this volume among the most satisfying. Joanne B. Freeman and Johann N. Neem here assemble thirteen essays composed by his former students; together, they represent not so much a festschrift as a series of deeply researched, rigorously argued, and gracefully written engagements on the question of Jefferson's statecraft. The approaches brought to bear on this endlessly suggestive subject are distinctive, as are the questions posed and conclusions rendered. But they all share with their mentor an abiding commitment, in Andrew Burstein's words, to clarifying “how history unfolds from a ground-level perspective” (p. 284).
What does this mean, this “ground-level perspective,” and what kind of investments does it entail? We are well beyond the point, presumably, when a full-fledged case must be made for dealing with historical subjects in their cultural contexts and situated exigencies; these are now givens. The authors know this, of course, and indeed spend little time in justifying the obvious. More interestingly, they show themselves to be stubbornly insistent on the complexity of their subject: its many paradoxes, its volatility, its shades and mysteries, its essential messiness. This is good news, but it also imposes on the authors particularly severe burdens of analysis and argumentation. For their subject, Jefferson, seems at once to invite such an approach and to place many obstacles in the path of executing it successfully. We have always wanted, quite reasonably, to make greater sense of Jefferson, to resolve the tensions and contradictions that seem to define his complex legacy. Jeffersonians in Power gives us compelling reasons to rethink such tendencies and to consider rather what might be gained from taking seriously those moments when ideals and realities collide. That's history from a “ground level perspective.”
