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Annual student essay contest endowed by Philip L. Carret aimed at having Elon University students reflect on the ideals and principles embodied in Thomas Jefferson's life and career. Top three prize-winning student essays from the competition based on the following topic: Britain and France, for Thomas Jefferson at least, posed philosophical as well as political challenges. In his ongoing attempts to define what it meant to be "American" after he had helped the thirteen colonies to declare independence, Jefferson often looked back across the Atlantic at European ideas and ideals about national identity. How did his intellectual and personal encounters with European societies shape Jefferson's conceptions of American identity and the development of new national ideas and institutions?

Annual student essay contest endowed by Philip L. Carret aimed at having Elon University students reflect on the ideals and principles embodied in Thomas Jefferson's life and career. Top three prize-winning student essays from the competition based on the following topic: From the beginning of the American experiment, Thomas Jefferson insisted upon the freedom of the press, confiding in 1786 to John Jay that "Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press." This same advocate of an unfettered press later took an apparently contradictory view of American newspapers. He went so far as to label them "chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smokes" and, in 1804, even suggested that state governments might claim an exclusive "right to controul the freedom of the press." What, exactly, did Jefferson mean by "the press"? And what role did he believe that the press should serve in a free and republican nation? What role did it play in Jefferson's own political experience?