What are you currently reading?

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?

 

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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.

 

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Rereading The Histories

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Let us not forget that Jefferson scoured the bookstall sellers in Paris, collected a HUGE library of books, and started the Library of Congress with it.

 

Just finished the John Carter of Mars series by Edger Rice Burroughs ...all eleven books for the third time.

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