America’s founding generation believed that an informed citizenry was vital to the survival of the Republic. Writing to theologian and philosopher Richard Price on January 8, 1789, Thomas Jefferson observed with satisfaction how his countrymen had come to largely embrace the new constitutional form of government just recently adopted. “A sense of this necessity, and a submission to it,” Jefferson told Price, “is to me a new and consolatory proof that wherever the people are well informed they...


















