Melissa Adler, "Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects" (Fordham UP, 2025)

Jan 28, 2026

Melissa Adler, Associate Professor of Information & Media Studies and author of Peculiar Satisfaction, explores how Thomas Jefferson shaped libraries, archives, and museums. She traces his cataloging and archival methods and their role in national memory. Short reflections cover classification that marginalizes, Jefferson’s museum practices, and why these institutions matter for democratic knowledge.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Librarian Roots Spark Research

Melissa Adler grew up visiting libraries and was influenced by a librarian grandmother, which shaped her career path.
On-the-job work managing subject authorities at a university library prompted her critical questions about cataloging.

INSIGHT

Documents As Living Monuments

Jefferson treated documents and institutions as monuments that shape public memory and political identity.
That monumentality makes classification systems durable and politically consequential beyond their original creators.

INSIGHT

Archival Practice As Nation-Building

Jefferson deliberately preserved and organized records because he saw them as essential to a durable democracy.
His archival practices aimed to make founding documents readable and instructive for future generations.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects (Fordham UP, 2025) examines how the ideals and contradictions of the nation’s founding live on in libraries, archives, and museums. Thomas Jefferson championed an informed citizenry as essential to democracy, yet the systems he built to organize knowledge reinforced racial and ideological hierarchies that persist today.

Melissa Adler explores Jefferson’s lasting influence on public institutions, from his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress, to his archival practices in government record-keeping and his museum at Monticello as a site of colonial knowledge production. Through an interdisciplinary lens, she reveals how his methods of classification and preservation shaped national memory and democratic participation.

Drawing from archival research and critical theory, Peculiar Satisfaction exposes the paradoxes of access, exclusion, and control embedded in information systems. As censorship and disinformation threaten democracy, Adler argues that understanding these foundational structures is essential to defending the role of knowledge in public life.

Melissa Adler is Associate Professor at Western University (London, Ontario) in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies. She is the author of Cruising the Library: Perversities in the Organization of Knowledge (Fordham)

Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025).

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/intellectual-history