Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives
The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, their Arabic Letters, and an American President
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Narrated by:
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Paul Boehmer
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By:
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Jeffrey Einboden
About this listen
On October 3, 1807, Thomas Jefferson was contacted by an unknown traveler urgently pleading for a private "interview" with the president, promising to disclose "a matter of momentous importance". By the next day, Jefferson held in his hands two astonishing manuscripts whose history has been lost for over two centuries. Authored by Muslims fleeing captivity in rural Kentucky, these documents delivered to the president in 1807 were penned by literate African slaves, and written entirely in Arabic.
Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives reveals the untold story of two escaped West Africans in the American heartland whose Arabic writings reached a sitting US president, prompting him to intervene on their behalf. Recounting a quest for emancipation that crosses borders of race, region and religion, Jeffrey Einboden unearths Arabic manuscripts that circulated among Jefferson and his prominent peers, including a document from 1780s Georgia which Einboden identifies as the earliest surviving example of Muslim slave authorship in the newly formed United States.
Revealing Jefferson's lifelong entanglements with slavery and Islam, Jefferson's Muslim Fugitives tracks the ascent of Arabic slave writings to the highest halls of US power, while questioning why such vital legacies from the American past have been entirely forgotten.
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- Length: 22 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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John and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth-tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results; and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. When John Adams succeeded George Washington as President, his son had already followed him into public service and was stationed in Europe as a diplomat.
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Very insightful and rewarding adding understanding
- By William on 05-12-19
By: Nancy Isenberg, and others
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Thomas Paine
- Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations
- By: Craig Nelson
- Narrated by: Paul Hecht
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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John Adams told Thomas Jefferson that “history is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine.” Thomas Edison called him “the equal of Washington in making American liberty possible.” He was a founder of both the United States and the French Revolution. He invented the phrase, “The United States of America.” He rose from abject poverty in working-class England to the highest levels of the era’s intellectual elite. And yet, by the end of his life, Thomas Paine was almost universally reviled.
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This man should be a household name!
- By Darlene Davis on 11-21-11
By: Craig Nelson
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The Road to Monticello
- The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Kevin J. Hayes
- Narrated by: David Baker
- Length: 25 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.
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Very Boring Book
- By Greg on 05-13-14
By: Kevin J. Hayes
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Revolutionary Brothers
- Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship That Helped Forge Two Nations
- By: Tom Chaffin
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 17 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Thomas Jefferson and the Marquis de Lafayette shared a singularly extraordinary friendship, one involved in the making of two revolutions - and two nations. Jefferson first met Lafayette in 1781, when the young French-born general was dispatched to Virginia to assist Jefferson, then the state’s governor, in fighting off the British. The charismatic Lafayette, hungry for glory, could not have seemed more different from Jefferson, the reserved statesman.
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Great story!
- By B Lawrence on 07-11-20
By: Tom Chaffin
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Washington's End
- The Final Years and Forgotten Struggle
- By: Jonathan Horn
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Washington’s End begins where most biographies of George Washington leave off, with the first president exiting office after eight years and entering what would become the most bewildering stage of his life. Embittered by partisan criticism and eager to return to his farm, Washington assumed a role for which there was no precedent at a time when the kings across the ocean yielded their crowns only upon losing their heads. In a different sense, Washington would lose his head, too.
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INTRIGUING SNAPSHOT
- By JPALJ on 02-23-20
By: Jonathan Horn
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Covered with Night
- A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America
- By: Nicole Eustace
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. This act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. Leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period.
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YES! I GET IT! I've read history before - JUST STOP!!!!! British settlers were arrogant jerks!! Aaaaaaaargh
- By Anonymous From MA on 06-02-22
By: Nicole Eustace
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Great State
- China and the World
- By: Timothy Brook
- Narrated by: Timothy Brook
- Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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The world-renowned scholar and author of Vermeer’s Hat does for China what Mary Beard did for Rome in SPQR: Timothy Brook analyzes the last eight centuries of China’s relationship with the world in this magnificent history that brings together accounts from civil servants, horse traders, spiritual leaders, explorers, pirates, emperors, migrant workers, invaders, visionaries, and traitors - creating a multifaceted portrait of this highly misunderstood nation.
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No Cohesiveness
- By Mark on 05-21-20
By: Timothy Brook
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Frederick Douglass
- Prophet of Freedom
- By: David W. Blight
- Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
- Length: 36 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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As a young man, Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) escaped from slavery in Baltimore, Maryland. He was fortunate to have been taught to read by his slave owner mistress, and he would go on to become one of the major literary figures of his time. He wrote three versions of his autobiography over the course of his lifetime and published his own newspaper. His very existence gave the lie to slave owners: with dignity and great intelligence, he bore witness to the brutality of slavery.
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The sound of rollerskating in sand
- By Rico X Ludovici on 02-06-19
By: David W. Blight
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Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
- By: Jon Meacham
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann, Jon Meacham
- Length: 18 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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In this magnificent biography, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Lion and Franklin and Winston brings vividly to life an extraordinary man and his remarkable times. Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power gives us Jefferson the politician and president, a great and complex human being forever engaged in the wars of his era.
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A Man and Biography Relevant to Our Day
- By Darwin8u on 11-14-12
By: Jon Meacham
What listeners say about Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Roger
- 12-02-20
A Real Struggle
I really struggled to finish this book.
I did finish it because the subject is interesting. The title is a little misleading, in that the book is about much more than Jefferson’s interactions with the Arabic writings of 2 runaway slaves. It covers Jefferson’s involvement with Muslims and North Africa over the course of his career and also delves into the contradictions inherent in the conflict between Jefferson’s expressed ideals and the fact that he owned slaves. The book is meticulously researched, and Einboden deserves much credit for unearthing several heretofore unknown Arabic writings by slaves.
I struggled because Einboden repeats himself so much that the book is easily twice as long as it needed to be. Einboden also stretches to find connections, frequently mistaking coincidences or ironies for actual connections.
Further, I found at least five factual errors:
• Einboden identified 1785 as the date of the Constitutional Convention, rather than 1787.
• He identified 1787 as the date when the Bill of Rights was drafted, rather than 1789.
• He said 13 states were needed for ratification of the Constitution, but Article VII stipulates that the Constitution would become effective when it was ratified by only 9 states, and in fact it went into effect with only 12 states having ratified.
• He called the US the world’s newest republic in 1807, overlooking Haiti.
• He identified Harvard, Yale and Princeton as part of the Ivy League, which was not created until 1954.
With better editing, this could have been a first-rate book.
Finally, the narration is better suited to a bodice-ripper than to a piece of scholarship.
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