Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson, Then and Now

An assistant professor of history at the City University of New York, Arthur Scherr is a maverick scholar who has challenged much of the current “established wisdom” in the history and historiography of the early United States. Each of his five heavily-researched books, “I Married Me a Wife”: Male Attitudes toward Women in the American Museum, 1787-1782 (1999); Thomas Jefferson’s Haitian Policy: Myths and Realities (2011); Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England: Nationalism versus Sectionalism in the Young Republic (2016); John Adams, Slavery, and Race: Ideas, Politics, and Diplomacy in an Age of Crisis (2018); and Rightful Liberty: Slavery, Morality, and Thomas Jefferson’s World (2021), has questioned and often refuted the underlying assumptions of many aspects of present-day historical scholarship, revealing that historians’ desire for collegiality and acceptance by the academic community often overrides devotion to factual accuracy and historical verisimilitude among scholars.