I’m very pleased to present this new live-blogging project, where I’ll publish the entirety of the correspondences between two of our most beloved Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, on the same date that the letters were originally sent, over two centuries later.

Before I begin, I want to extend a very warm thank you to my friend Guan Yang for being the source of inspiration behind this project. On this same day, May 16, 2010, Guan’s kicking off his own project – Live Lincoln – where he’ll be live-tweeting the daily events of the entirety of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, beginning with the Republican Convention. When he announced his plan yesterday, I was so inspired by the idea that after volunteering to help him out in any way that I could, I got to thinking about the potential for other such projects. Since I’ve always been especially fond of Thomas Jefferson, I thought perhaps something similar could be done in his honor.
That’s when I thought of a book that my parents recently gave to me – a collection of the correspondence between Jefferson and Adams. I instantly thought it could potentially be an interesting blogging project to mirror the work that Guan’s doing to bring the lessons of Lincoln’s presidency to the 21st century, using the tools of modern social media.
After thinking about it for a while, I pulled out my book filled with all the letters written between these two men, wondering when the very first letter was sent.

Much to my surprise, the very first letter sent by Thomas Jefferson to John Adams was sent on May 16, 1777.
That gave me one day to pull together a blog and bring this newborn idea to fruition.

I’ve been up all night. I’ve come up with a plan, thought up a name, designed a blog, registered domains (which still haven’t come through…), and even come up with ideas to expand this project in the future. There are still a lot of rough edges that will need to be refined, but I’m excited to see how this will grow and develop over time.
But for right now, I’d just like to kick it off with the first letter and a big thank you to Guan. Thanks for your creativity, it’s always an inspiration.