Hannah Jefferson: Fill & Download for Free

Jerry Cupat wrote the definitive answer here. But the linguistic ability of American presidents is underrated.Herbert Hoover, for example, studied Chinese, and his wife Lou learned it pretty well. Before he became president, the Hoovers lived in China, Australia, Burma and Siberia for years, where he worked as a geologist and mining engineer. When they needed to have a “secret conversation,” Herbert and Lou sometimes had it in Chinese. Lou liked to wear the local clothing in Japan and Burma:The Hoovers, originally from Iowa, had both studied geology at Stanford. In 1912, they published an important translation from Latin, Agricola’s De re metallica, a German mining treatise written in 1556.Other presidents and first ladies also had language skills.Theodore Roosevelt was fairly proficient in German and French, though it was said that he spoke French with a German accent. He also understood some Dutch, partly because his grandparents spoke it in New York City when he was a kid there just after the Civil War. Roosevelt’s grandparents were born and raised in the United States, but Dutch was a living language in parts of the Hudson Valley into the 19th century.As a matter of fact, two other important Americans — President Martin Van Buren and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth — were native Dutch speakers. Van Buren learned perfect English in school, but his Dutch accent came out when he got excited. His wife Hannah never lost her Dutch accent, though she was also born in New York State. Sojourner Truth was one of the few African Americans who spoke Dutch as her first language. Like the Van Burens, she was a native of the Hudson Valley.Franklin Roosevelt, who came from the same New York Dutch family as his cousin Theodore, was raised speaking French and German, since he had European governesses. Supposedly, Franklin Roosevelt spoke both languages with a New York or New England accent.James Polk (president from 1845–49) gave the welcoming address at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Latin during his graduation ceremony there in 1818.John Quincy Adams got most of his education in Europe, where he became totally fluent in French and learned a lot of Dutch. After James Madison appointed him to be the first U.S. ambassador to Russia in 1809, Adams lived in St. Petersburg — during the days when Tolstoy’s War and Peace was set there. Adams did learn some Russian, though since French was the language of diplomacy back then and the Russian aristrocracy preferred to speak French even to each other, he got by just fine without mad Russian skills.Thomas Jefferson, though, was definitely the greatest linguist among U.S. Presidents. Though Jefferson could barely understand spoken French when he got off a boat in France for the first time — he was totally baffled — he had definitely studied it in colonial Virginia. At his library in Monticello, Jefferson had books in Arabic, Italian, Irish Gaelic, Welsh and Dutch. He probably didn’t read those languages well, but he had some interest. And like almost every college graduate in his time, Jefferson read Greek and Latin.The story goes that he learned to read Spanish in 19 days, on a ship to France in 1784, using just a basic Spanish grammar and a copy of Don Quixote. John Quincy Adams had dinner with him twenty years later, when Adams wrote:As to Spanish, it was so easy that [Jefferson] had learned it, with the help of a Don Quixote lent him by Mr. Cabot, and a grammar, in the course of a passage to Europe, on which he was but nineteen days at sea. But Mr. Jefferson tells large stories...Jefferson also taught two of his daugthers to speak Spanish, saying it was the most important language for Americans to study after French. In the hills outside Charlottesville, Mary Jefferson had to read ten pages a day from Don Quixote.

Two answers here so far, one naming Missouri and one Kentucky…I grew up in Missouri and Kentucky.I lived in a very small, backwoods, rural town in Jefferson County, Missouri until I was nine. Hick-ville? Heck yes.But I don't remember rebel flags. I don't remember southern accents or everybody drinking sweet iced tea or kids calling their grandpa, “papaw.”When we moved to Kentucky, to a military town about 45 minutes south of Louisville, I noticed all these things.I remember being confused, as a kid, because I’d looked at a map and knew we’d moved east, not south.Both Missouri and Kentucky were slave states prior to the Civil War but did not secede, and became neutral border states during the war. Only in Kentucky did I have schoolteachers who voiced the opinion that it would have been better to pick a side, even if it ended up being the losing side. As historian E. Merton Coulter once said, “Kentucky waited until after the war was over to secede from the Union.”Having lived in Kentucky for most of my life, I can tell you that it has a very strong Midwestern feel compared to the actual Deep South, where my mother is from. This is especially true in Louisville, a diverse hipsterville that secedes politically from the rest of the state come election time.However, the pull of Southern culture is strong. You hear “y’all” and “whale water” (well water) and “wrassle” (wrestle), even in Louisville. Grandma and Grandpa are Mamaw and Papaw, confederate flags show up on bumper stickers and garage walls, and our favorite local diners appear in Southern Living magazine.Some of our favorite things are distinctly Kentuckian, but have a definite Southern feel to them: Derby Day, Jim Beam, Mint Juleps at Churchill Downs, the Kentucky Bourbon trail…(yeah, most of it involves alcohol or horses or both).Kentucky is a unique state, but identifies most strongly with Southern culture, in my experience.Wadda y’all think?

Talking about race is hard. Most of the texts addressing race that I’m familiar with fall into one of two categories. Some authors choose to express their thoughts through artistic, abstract means — Clint Smith’s poetry and Toni Morrison’s novels come to mind. Others choose a more traditional research-based, factual approach — like Michelle Alexander’s New Jim Crow or Richard Rothstein’s Color of Law.I’d argue that both are necessary. Pieces like Alexander and Rothstein’s help us understand the big picture, the magnitude of the issues, and the systematic forces behind them. Artistic reflections help us understand what those systems mean at a human level, and provide context and nuance. This dichotomy of “systems” thought vs. “stories” thought comes up in many settings (I’m reminded of Mills Baker's answer to What are good arguments for using “story thought” in an organization?).Ta-Nehisi Coates does a stunning job of merging these two interpretations in his latest piece. While reading this piece, at times I found myself tearing up at how powerful his verse is and how viscerally he communicates his thoughts. Other times I furiously screenshotted pages full of research about voting patterns so that I could arm myself with “non-emotional” talking points for the inevitable moment that someone tells me I need to calm down in a discussion about racism, sexism, and other -isms (why is popular discourse so keen on barring emotion from these discussions?).Consider this excerpt:THE SCOPE OF TRUMP’S commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular disbelief in the power of whiteness…To their neoliberal economics, Democrats and liberals have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks the white man as history’s greatest monster and prime-time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working-class people…That black people, who have lived for centuries under such derision and condescension, have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis, Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by arguments about intersectionality, and oppressed by new bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.He starts us out with a strong and potentially provocative intro sentence, dips into prosaic example (“prime-time television’s biggest doofus”), subtly points out hypocrisy (“that black people…does not trouble these theoreticians”), says what we think better than we can say itself (“”glee with which liberals call out bigotry is assigned more power than the bigotry itself” — YES! Why are we screaming about political correctness when he’s literally talking about sexually assaulting women??) and then slowly escalates, jam-packing an election season’s worth of drama into a sentence and ending with this obvious truth we struggle to reconcile (“white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality-television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.”).And if that wasn’t enough, the next several numerically-dense paragraphs break down voting data, income data, racial data piece by piece until the reader has no choice but to question the economic anxiety narrative we’ve become so accustomed to, and consider that there’s something we’re missing here. And when we’re left struggling what to make of it all, he hits us with this:To accept that whiteness brought us Donald Trump is to accept whiteness as an existential danger to the country and the world. But if the broad and remarkable white support for Donald Trump can be reduced to the righteous anger of a noble class of smallville firefighters and evangelicals, mocked by Brooklyn hipsters and womanist professors into voting against their interests, then the threat of racism and whiteness, the threat of the heirloom, can be dismissed. Consciences can be eased; no deeper existential reckoning is required.Coates masterfully through familiar metaphor and matter-of-fact bluntness makes us face that existential reckoning that maybe we’ve been avoiding.I’m struggling to not block-quote the entire article here. The next few paragraphs he points out countless contradictory ways we think and talk about race in the public sphere, alluding to many points that were common talking points during the election:And so an opioid epidemic among mostly white people is greeted with calls for compassion and treatment, as all epidemics should be, while a crack epidemic among mostly black people is greeted with scorn and mandatory minimums.…Sympathetic op‑ed columns and articles are devoted to the plight of working-class whites when their life expectancy plummets to levels that, for blacks, society has simply accepted as normal.…There is a tremendous amount of anger and frustration among working-class whites, particularly where there is an economic downturn,” a researcher told the Los Angeles Times. “These people feel left out; they feel government is not responsive to them.” By this logic, postwar America—with its booming economy and low unemployment—should have been an egalitarian utopia and not the violently segregated country it actually was.…It’s worth asking why the country has not been treated to a raft of sympathetic portraits of this “forgotten” young black electorate, forsaken by a Washington bought off by Davos elites and special interests. The unemployment rate for young blacks (20.6 percent) in July 2016 was double that of young whites (9.9 percent).These statements force us to reconsider the ‘why he won’ narrative and extreme sympathy evoked for the disenchanted white voter, while the same perspective applied to a different voter is written off as identity politics. When it’s necessary he backs up what he’s saying with data to demonstrate his point (e.g. black unemployment rates). At other times, he simplifies a potentially complex issue with logical parallels (why don’t we see the same moral outrage towards the opioid epidemic as we did with crack?).Throughout the entire piece, Coates gives us facts, data, pull quotes, speeches, photographs, reflections, monologues, and more. He dives into the foundation of our country, slavery, reconstruction, Southern democrats, post-war America, the war on drugs, the housing crisis, the modern day Republican party, the first black president, and the first white president. Sometimes he appeals to our calm, cool, and collected side; at others, he appeals to our humanity; he always knows which to choose. He tears down arguments we’ve made to make ourselves feel better about these realities, exposes the hypocrisy in the excuses we make, forces us to consider race no mater how hard it might be, and finally and makes us ask ourselves why we are really so surprised.And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all its affairs—the prosperity of its entire economy; the security of its 300 million citizens; the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food; the future of its vast system of education; the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways; the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase grab ’em by the pussy into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.