Alan Pell Crawford

Alan Pell Crawford (born 1953) is an American author and journalist who, in his books and articles, has written on the period of the United States' founding and, in a recent departure, published How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain.

His previous book, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, a Washington Post best-seller, casts new light on the retirement of the nation’s third president and author of the Declaration of Independence.[1]

Career

A journalist and political analyst, a former U.S. Senate speechwriter and congressional press secretary,[2] Crawford is also a public speaker, who has spoken at the Union Club of the City of New York,[3] Politics & Prose in Washington, D.C.,[4] and the Virginia Center for History and Culture,[5] as well as historical societies and book groups, and been interviewed on the Motley Fool podcast,[6] and Biographers International Organization podcast,[7] as well as Coast to Coast AM.[8] Crawford has been a resident scholar at George Washington’s Mount Vernon,[9] at the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello[10] and at the Boston Athenaeum.[11]

His articles, essays and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,[12] The Washington Post'',[13] the Nation, National Review,[14] and the Weekly Standard.[15]

Crawford first came to national attention in 1977, with an article in The Nation, entitled "Richard Viguerie’s Bid for Power." The first major investigative reporting on the self-described New Right in American politics, the article drew on Crawford’s own experience in Washington’s emerging “conservative movement.” “Richard Viguerie’s Bid for Power” was expanded in book form in Thunder on the Right: The ‘New Right’ and the Politics of Resentment, Crawford’s first book, published in 1980.[16]

Crawford wrote his second book about Ann Cary Randolph Morris entitled Unwise Passions: The True Story of a Remarkable Woman and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America, published in 2000, using sources from archives throughout the United States. His third book, Twilight at Monticello, published in 2008, also drew on primary sources to cast new light on the debt-ridden retirement of Thomas Jefferson.[17] The post-presidential years were also those in which Jefferson’s views on a range of important questions—on the nature of constitutional government, on the institution of slavery and on the future of the American experiment in self-government—underwent significant changes.[18] The Associated Press stated that in the Twilight at Monticello Crawford “had access to thousands of family letters—some previously unexamined by historians—that he used to create his portrait of the complex idealist, [and] there are some surprising tidbits to be found.”[19]

gollark: I don't really want to do very abstract mathy stuff for ages, which is also mentioned in my notes.
gollark: A 17x17 grid is small enough that you can probably get away with inefficiency, ubq.
gollark: I see.
gollark: Oops too many newlines.
gollark: Quoted from my notes:The relevant factors for course choice are probably something like this, vaguely in order: “personal fit” - how much I'll actually like it. This is quite hard to tell in advance. During the Y11 careers interview I was recommended some kind of trial thing for engineering, but I doubt that's on now, like many other things. Probably more important than other things, as I'd spend 3-5 years on said course, will perform better if I do enjoy it, and will probably not get much use out of studying a subject I would not like enough to do work related to. flexibility/generality - what options are opened by studying this stuff? Especially important in a changing and unpredictable world. how hard a subject is to learn out of university - relates to necessity of feedback from people who know it much better, specialized equipment needed, availability of good teaching resources, etc. Likely to decline over time due to the internet/modern information exchange systems and advancing technology making relevant equipment cheaper. earning potential - how much money does studying this bring? I don't think this is massively significant, it's probably outweighed by other things quite rapidly, but something to consider. Apparently high for quantitative and applied subjects. entry requirements - how likely I am to be able to study it. There are some things I probably cannot do at all now, such as medicine, but I didn't and don't really care about those, and there shouldn't be many. Most of the high-requirement stuff is seemingly available with more practical ones at less prestigious universities, which is probably fine.

References

Further reading

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