Thomas Jefferson Conversation Cards | 19-Card Historical Set

Most history cards ask you what year something happened.

These ask you what you think about it.

Nineteen cards. Thomas Jefferson at the centre, and around him the people who made him and the people he owned. A portrait, the facts of their life, and one question with no answer printed anywhere. Not a quiz. Something to say out loud at a table and then argue about for twenty minutes.

He wrote that all men are created equal while owning more than six hundred people. How does a nation reckon with its finest words coming from a man who couldn't live them?

That's a card.

A question is written on each card, meant to start a conversation. Sometimes it is a hard one. But this is our real history.

Around him: John Locke, whose sentence about life, liberty and estate Jefferson rewrote into the one everybody knows — and who held stock in the Royal African Company while he wrote it. Sally Hemings, who could have stayed free in Paris and came back to Virginia. Her brother James, the first American trained as a French chef, who had to teach his replacement before Jefferson would free him. His wife Martha, who inherited her own half-sister as property and carried her into the marriage. His daughter Patsy, who was nine when her mother died and spent her life keeping his house. Sally's daughter Harriet, who walked out at twenty-one and lived the rest of her life as a white woman.

Every fact verified. Every image verified. Facts that couldn't be checked were left off, including some very good stories. That's why sets come out one at a time.

Where no likeness can be verified, the card carries an empty frame instead of a stranger's face.

No one painted any of the slaves of Monticello.

Made by hand. Printed, cut, laminated and shrink-wrapped here — never sent out to a print service. The lamination means a set survives a kitchen table, a classroom and a backpack.

Who it's for: homeschool families, classroom teachers, road trips, dinner tables, history readers and collectors. Ages roughly 10 and up — younger with an adult, and honestly the adults argue harder.

Conversation, Not Memorization.