In the Hands of the People: Thomas Jefferson on Equality, Faith, Freedom, Compromise, and the Art of Citizenship Audiobook

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham offers a collection of inspiring words about how to be a good citizen, from Thomas Jefferson and others, and reminds us why our country’s founding principles are still so important today. Thomas Jefferson believed in the covenant between a government and its citizens, in both the government’s responsibilities to its people and also the people’s responsibility to the republic. In this illuminating book, a project of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation at Monticello, the #1 New York Times bestselling author Jon Meacham presents selections from Jefferson’s writing on the subject, with an afterword by Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Annette Gordon-Reed and comments on Jefferson’s ideas from others, including Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, Frederick Douglass, Carl Sagan, and American presidents. This curated collection revitalizes how to see an individual’s role in the world, as it explores such Jeffersonian concepts as religious freedom, the importance of a free press, public education, participation in government, and others. Meacham writes, “In an hour of twenty-first-century division and partisanship, of declining trust in institutions and of widespread skepticism about the long-term viability of the American experiment, it is instructive to return to first principles. Not, to be sure, as an exercise in nostalgia or as a flight from the reality of our own time, but as an honest effort to see, as Jefferson wrote, what history may be able to tell us about the present and the future.” Read by Fred Sanders and Edoardo Ballerini, with Paul Boehmer, Mark Bramhall, Amanda Carlin, Janina Edwards, Robert Fass, Jim Frangione, Dion Graham, Johnny Heller, JD Jackson, Arthur Morey, George Newbern, and Christine Rendel

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“Fred Sanders and Edoardo Ballerini highlight a full-cast narration—punctuated with musical interludes—in this stirring presentation of Jefferson on America and Americans on Jefferson. In these exquisitely chosen texts, Jefferson is passionate and prescient, insisting on a free press and freedom of religion, even foreseeing foreign enemies who might subvert the electoral process…‘Wherever the people are well informed,’ Jefferson wrote in 1789, ‘they can be trusted with their own government, [and] whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.’ Or not.”

— AudioFile