In the half-century since Monticello endowed a chair in history at the University of Virginia three men have held the post of Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History at Jefferson's university: Dumas Malone, Merrill Peterson, and Peter S. Onuf. Malone's six-volume biography, Jefferson and His Time (1948–82), remains the definitive (albeit sympathetic) biography of its subject. Peterson's Thomas Jefferson and the New Nation (1970) is the best one-volume biography of Jefferson (though, at 1,100 pages, it stretches the notion of what constitutes a single volume).

Unlike his predecessors, Peter Onuf has resisted the temptation to write a biography of the founder of his university and the raison d'être of the foundation which endowed his chair. Nonetheless Onuf has done more to shape our understanding of Jefferson and his time than any other scholar over the past generation. While his predecessors wrote lengthy biographies of Jefferson, Onuf has influenced Jefferson scholarship by supervising numerous Ph.D. dissertations, presiding over scholarly organizations, collaborating with numerous scholars and, as this volume demonstrates, writing numerous essays (often arising from papers delivered around the world).

The Mind of Thomas Jefferson collects thirteen previously published and unpublished essays written by Onuf over the past fifteen years. As a senior scholar's reflections on his subject, these essays demonstrate themes which have been central to the study of Jefferson generally and Onuf's scholarship in particular. Onuf offers reflections on the state of Jefferson historiography, as well as Jefferson's thinking on religion as well as education. The two most prominent themes in the volume, however, concern race and American expansion. In his earlier historiographical essays, Onuf observes that race and slavery remain dominant themes in Jefferson studies. In this volume he presents three essays which seek to move beyond indicting or defending Jefferson over the question of slavery. Rather, Onuf seeks to interrogate and closely examine Jefferson's complex thinking with regard to slavery and race, and to locate it within the context of his time and place. The picture is hardly flattering. Jefferson's devotion to the geographic expansion of the early republic is another major theme of this collection, and a particular concern of Onuf's – as befits a scholar whose first monograph concerned the Northwest Ordinance. In four essays, which constitute the core of the volume, Onuf demonstrates that expansion was at the heart of Jefferson's constitutional and ideological thinking. He makes a clear connection between the Louisiana Purchase and Jefferson's conception of the evolution of the federal union.

Peter Onuf views the study of Jefferson as an ongoing colloquy between scholars and their subject. These essays show that, despite the lengthy biographies of his predecessors, there remains much to say about the third President. Taken together, these essays, which cohere nicely, offer a compelling and complex intellectual portrait of Thomas Jefferson. They will not and cannot be the last words on the subject.