5. Oral History Project
Of the hundreds of slaves who worked on Monticello, history has eight photographs. Thomas Jefferson kept complete logs, though. Every name of every slave sits in a massive log, endless names on a page with no story to accompany them. To recover those stories, in 1993 the Monticello team started tracking down the descendants of those names. They’ve been collecting an oral history of everything they can track, breathing life into those names as much as they can. To date, they’ve accumulated some 200 interviews.