Good Day Thomas Jefferson, our podcast listeners.

And as always, sincerely, thank you for listening.

We're glad to have you aboard.

This week, a really difficult conversation about an essential subject which is

memorial statues place names etc as you all know the statue of theater

Roosevelt in front of the American Museum of Natural History is coming down.

Princeton is cleansing itself of at least part of its heritage to Woodrow Wilson, who was its president for a time,

and a professor there, a statue of Jefferson came down in Portland, Oregon.

There's talk in some quarters of even demolishing the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C. I know I get asked about this

absolutely every day, David. I've been writing about it for governing.com.

People can look at my articles and essays. I just submitted one this morning about the Roosevelt statue at the American

Museum of Natural History and how a humanist, how a humanity scholar tries to process a question like

this.

In other words, it's not simply judgment, take it down, keep it up.

It's an attempt to evaluate how to think about this,

or how at least a humanity scholar of my training would attempt to think about this.

It's a huge issue and I know that Dr. Ellis has been thinking about it too in his seclusion

in Vermont and so we wanted to have a conversation with him this

week it turned out to be I think a really rich one but also for me an exhausting

one and I think for you too it's a it's a hard subject and it's

painful for us to try to work our way through it and I don't think that anybody really

has a monopoly on the right answer to these questions.

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