The David Library of the American Revolution will present a lecture on Thomas Jefferson by Robert M. S. McDonald — a member of the faculty at the United States Military Academy at West Point — on Sunday, October 2 at 3 p.m. The public is invited to the admission-free event, which will be held at the David Library, 1201 River Road, Washington Crossing, Reservations are required. 

Mr. McDonald’s lecture is titled, “Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson, Revered and Reviled,” and is based on his new book, Confounding Father, Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (Univ. of Virginia Press $29.95).

An adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute, Mr. McDonald is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his PhD. A specialist on Thomas Jefferson and the early American republic, he is editor of Thomas Jefferson’s Military Academy: Founding West Point, and author of Light & Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge, and Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés. He is completing an edited volume to be titled Thomas Jefferson’s Lives: Biographers and the Battle for History. He lives in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York, with his wife, Christine, and their children Jefferson and Grace.

“Few figures in American history provoke as much of a division in public opinion as Thomas Jefferson,” according to Mr. McDonald, who serves on the David Library’s Academic Advisory Council.

Reservations for this lecture can be made by calling (215) 493-6776 x 100 or by sending an email to rsvp@dlar.org.

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