2006 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?
