Jefferson’s Third Library: Human Rights

Thomas Jefferson’s own original library collection was sold to the country to become the Library of Congress (archived article #42 at https://www.murrysvillelibrary.org). He immediately began a second personal library collection to feed his insatiable need for books, about which Dumas Malone wrote in his six-volume “Jefferson and His Time,” Little, Brown and Company, Boston (1948 -1981). Jefferson was a very curious person, an avid reader, a collector of books, more accomplished than seemingly possible, and, at the same time, justly subject to a claim of hypocrisy, a slaveholder. Still, he was intensely a student of human rights, along with politics, science, and engineering. So, were he to start a 21st century library, his third such, with what new books might he start the collection…