Your weekly conversation with our third president.

The Jefferson Watch

Civil Discourse

Critical Thinking

Good Citizenship

Thomas Jefferson was a student of the Enlightenment, of human nature and of honorable behavior. He applied this to his personal life and to the national & global challenges he faced during the forming of the United States. 

Clay Jenkinson, the nationally-acclaimed humanities scholar and award-winning first-person interpreter of Thomas Jefferson, portrays Jefferson on the program. Clay addresses listener questions with answers grounded in the writings and actions of Jefferson.

Our mission is to generate discourse between friends and family members which will grow into a national discourse about the topics essential to our country and citizens.

You can now record your question by calling the TJH Hotline: (701) 575-0727

You can contact us by email below, or write to us at: 

Makoche Studios
c/o The Thomas Jefferson Hour
208 N 4th St
Bismarck, ND 58501

If you are sending a donation, please mail your contribution to:

The Thomas Jefferson Hour
1900 Burnt Boat Dr. STE 102
Bismarck, ND 58503

The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Inc., is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization under tax ID #46-5726534.

Praise for the Thomas Jefferson Hour

The reason the TJ Hour works is obvious when you listen—it is Clay Jenkinson: his on-air warmth and intelligence, the breadth of his knowledge, the concerns toward which he directs the discussion, and his ability to connect with the public radio audience. The idea of using Thomas Jefferson as a framing device gives the discussion a perspective that distinguishes it from the usual public affairs discussion. It combines actual, serious discussion of important, overriding principles with the entertainment of the Thomas Jefferson set-up.  It works.  

Bill Thomas
Director of Radio
Prairie Public, North Dakota

The Thomas Jefferson Hour is a thought-provoking way of exploring contemporary issues through the lens of history. Clay Jenkinson brings listeners interesting and thoughtful perspectives in an engaging way.

Joe Moore
Director of Program Content
KVPR Fresno and KPRX Bakersfield, CA

The Thomas Jefferson Hour has been a staple of WHRV's lineup since its inception. With this market's deep history as home to our nation's first region, the Jamestown Colony's founding in 1607, and our Commonwealth's ties to Thomas Jefferson, interest in this program over the years has resulted in a sizeable listener base. We have hosted debates between Thomas Jefferson (Clay Jenkinson) and Alexander Hamilton (Bill Chrystal), and they've been overwhelmingly well-attended by enthusiastic audiences. In addition to our very popular local call-in shows, it's one of our most popular public affairs programs. 

Anthony McSpadden
Director of Programming
WHRV, Norfolk, VA

The Thomas Jefferson Hour was named one of the "Best Under-the-Radar Podcasts" of 2015 by Mother Jones.

Read their March/April 2015 interview with Clay Jenkinson, both in and out of character.

Join the 1776 Club

The 1776 Club includes exclusive bonus material and unlimited access to the episode archive which, when completed, will date back to the origins of the show in the early 2000s — about 15 years of the Thomas Jefferson Hour.

Your support keeps the show running and helps it grow.
Please note that membership in the 1776 Club is not tax-deductible.
To make a tax-deductible donation to The Thomas Jefferson Hour, Inc., visit our donate page.

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Clay's Publications

For the Love of North Dakota and Other Essays: Sundays with Clay in the Bismarck Tribune
(2012)

"Expertise and modesty. Not a bad combination."
Richard Aregood
Grand Forks Herald, 2013
read the full review

Becoming Jefferson's People: Re-Inventing the American Republic in the Twenty-First Century
(2005)

Audiobook

The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness
(2011)

The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness takes a fresh look at Meriwether Lewis, the commander of the most important exploration mission in the early history of the United States. Jenkinson’s Lewis is not a paper cutout hero, but a hyper-serious young man of great complexity, who found the wilderness of upper Louisiana as burdensome as it was exhilarating. 

Jenkinson sees Lewis as a man who had a fissure in his soul before he left St. Charles, Missouri, in May 1804, whose experiences in lands “upon which the foot of civilized man had never trodden” further fractured his sense of himself. Jenkinson sees Lewis’s 1809 suicide not as an inexplicable mystery, but the culmination of a series of pressures that extend back into the expedition and perhaps beyond. 

Jenkinson’s argument is that Lewis’s hiring of William Clark as his “partner in discovery” was the most intelligent decision he ever made. When Clark is nearby Lewis manages to maintain a stable and productive leadership. When Clark is absent, when he is unable to provide a calming influence on his mercurial friend, Lewis tends to get into trouble. Jenkinson argues that if Clark had been with Lewis on the Natchez Trace, the Governor of Upper Louisiana would not have killed himself. 

The Character of Meriwether Lewis features chapters on Lewis’s sense of humor, his oft-stated fear that the expedition he was leading might collapse, his propensity for employing his learnedness in a self-conscious manner, and his inability to re-enter “polite society” after his return. 

Jenkinson attempts to reconstruct Lewis’s rich, troubled, and self-consciously heroic personality from his journal entries and letters. When the encrustations of American mythology are removed and Lewis is allowed to reveal himself, he emerges as a fuller, more human, and endlessly fascinating explorer.

Message on the Wind: A Spiritual Odyssey on the Northern Plains
(2011)

Clay's Recommended Reading

On Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation
by Merrill D. Peterson

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
by Joseph Ellis

The Sage of Monticello
by Dumas Malone

Thomas Jefferson: The Strange Case of Mistaken Identity
by Alf J. Mapp

Thomas Jefferson
by Albert J. Nock

Thomas Jefferson: An Intimate History
by Fawn Brodie

On Lewis & Clark

Meriwether Lewis: A Biography
by Richard Dillon. New York: Coward-McCann, 1965.

Lewis and Clark: Partners in Discovery
by John Bakeless. New York: William Morrow, 1947.

The Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents: 1783-1854
edited by Donald Jackson. 2nd edition, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978.

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
by Stephen Ambrose. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Passage Through the Garden: Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest
by John Logan Allen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

Other Favorites

Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens

The thing about classics is that they are always newly great. I reread Great Expectations at the end of the summer, and I was amazed at how much was fresh to me and how powerful the book is.

Robinson Crusoe
by Daniel Defoe

This summer I hiked 173 miles on the Little Missouri River between Marmarth, North Dakota, to the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The trip made me think about the basic rhythms of life. So, when I returned, much dehydrated and leaned up, I read Robinson Crusoe. It was a wonderful read. Jefferson believed that in civilizing (not Christianizing) Indians, the first two English texts should be Aesop's Fables and Robinson Crusoe. Of course, we now know that American Indians did not need Jefferson to teach them civilization.

Walden
by Henry David Thoreau

If there were only one American book, it would have to be Walden. I read this on the Little Missouri River. It's the only book I have read twenty times. Note: Don't blame Thoreau for not being John Muir. He was not trying to live in the wilderness. He was engaged in a simplicity experiment. If you read this book the way it demands to be read, it will change your life.

The Sorrows of Empire
by Chalmers Johnson

This is one of the most sobering books you will read this year. Johnson's view is that we are an empire, we want to be an empire, and that we do everything that is required to maintain our empire. The book doesn't have anything to do with spreading freedom and self-government around the world.

The Re-Enchantment of the World
by Morris Berman

This is a really fabulous book about how western civilization cut itself off from the life of the spirit, the life of the planet, and the soul's work. Thoreau wrote, "how many a man has dated a new era of his life from the reading of a book?" That's what happened to me with Berman's book.

When Trumpets Call
by Patricia O'Toole

This is a marvelous study of the post-Presidential life of Theodore Roosevelt. During the ten years following his retirement from the Presidency, Roosevelt went on safari on Africa, and he explored one of the last uncharted rivers in South America. He also ran for a third term, wrote one of the best Presidential autobiographies, and crusaded for progressive reforms in the United States. This is a very well written study of Roosevelt's "retirement" years. It does not necessarily put him in a wholly favorable light.

His Excellency: George Washington
by Joseph Ellis

I think Joseph Ellis has written some of the best analysis of the Founding Fathers. His American Sphinx is a quirky study of Jefferson, but marvelous in its wit and thoughtfulness, and his Passionate Sage (John Adams) is one of the best books I have read about that era. His Excellency is a fresh look at George Washington. Ellis reminds us of two parts of Washington's achievement that have not received enough attention: his commitment to do something about slavery, and his interest in seeing to it that justice was done to the Indian tribes of the West. For new reasons, Washington emerges as the greatest of the Founding Fathers, much greater in character than Jefferson.

Clay Jenkinson is one of the most sought-after humanities scholars in the United States