Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast introduction to this week's Thomas Jefferson. I am

delighted even thrilled to be sharing this program with my beloved child Catherine Missouri

Walker Jenkinson who is a graduate student at Oxford University. You're about 5,000 miles away

from Bismarck, North Dakota or vice versa and yet I see you as if you were in the next room.

An amazing moment in the history of technology among other things.

It's so cool. It really is amazing. It feels like we're sitting across the table and in fact

the audio is probably better because I can't hear the worrying of the dishwasher or cars driving

by. It's really incredible. Which we would do. This program is about alcohol in the age of Jefferson

and really I don't think we've ever done this program before. You know in the history of the

Jefferson hour 30 years Charles Bankhead's story is so upsetting to me to think that there was

domestic violence at Monticello and that nobody knew what to do about it. Finally

Ann Randolph's father Thomas Mann Randolph, his only solution is to knock

Bankhead on the head with a fire poker. That's no answer to these problems. Maybe it was the

only answer that was available but violence upon violence. I know situations of domestic

violence. I've seen them in my life and I know how horrific it was but I think the important

point is we've never done this show before. You brought a particular sensibility to it.

I think you're a little impatient with Jefferson here because I think you think why didn't you

do something so I don't know what that something would have been but yeah. I don't mean to be

impatient. It's just that you want to believe that a family as powerful as the Jefferson's or the

Randolph's would be able to protect their daughter and granddaughter and of course that's not how

this works. You know the domestic abuse is widespread. It's complex. It's often hidden but when

it's so public in this way and it escalates to the father of Jefferson's granddaughter,

...