We should be grateful the founders of this country were so well educated. Somewhere along the way a good education with many broad topics learned has become a for profit system churning out either corporate lawyers and executives or religious fundamentalists. Where are the Liberal Arts?
Basically, I think, Franklin was the only relatively uneducated one, he was done with education by age ten. But he was a self taught genius. Alexander Hamilton went to King’s College (Columbia University) Thomas Jefferson, William and Mary James Madison, College of New Jersey (Princeton) John Adams and John Hancock, Harvard And since this is the reading thread, here is Jefferson's suggested reading list of authors: Herodotus Thucydides Xenophon Polybius Julius Caesar Sallust (historian) Livy Quintus Curtius Rufus Josephus Plutarch Suetonius Tacitus Justin (historian) Herodian Aurelius Victor Gibbons Plato Cicero Plutarch Xenophon Seneca Epictetus Pythagoras Marcus Aurelius Lucretius John Locke Henry Home, Lord Kames David Hume Voltaire Claude Adrien Helvétius Conyers Middleton Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke James Beattie Homer Virgil John Milton Sophocles Aeschylus Euripides Demosthenes Isocrates William Shakespeare Terence Horace Edward Young Theocritus Anacreon Joseph Addison Moliere Metastasio Jonathan Swift Alexander Pope 'Ossian' (James Macpherson) William Robertson William Douglass Thomas Hutchison William Smith Samuel Smith Benjamin Franklin Captain John Smith William Stith Sir William Keith Robert Beverly
I read that Jefferson loved living in Paris, and when there almost bankrupted himself buying up all the books he could and shipping them back to Monticello. And we know what happened with them after that, right?
1888"It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement." In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas.
I am currently reading "The Shadow Rising" by Robert Jordan as I continue my quest to read The Wheel Of Time Series before I die.