In this enlarged version of his 1973 Jefferson lectures for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Erikson applies his concept of identity in a psychohistorical essay on Thomas Jefferson and Americans in general. He sees Jefferson as a protean man, both as a man of many gifts and as a man of chameleonlike adaptation to passing scenes. Among the themes included in Jefferson's identity are Jefferson as natural aristocrat, as surveyor, as amateur, as ideologue, as educator, as designer, and as maker. However, as in most of Erikson's writings, his intention is larger than the description of an individual identity. He wants to relate Jefferson's protean personality to the need of early Americans to construct an “American character” and to their conscious attempts to do so. This protean personality, conveying the ability of a man to make many things of himself, is appropriate to the colonial conception of the