Download Best Full-Length Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/519137 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Outlaws of the Wild West

Author: Terry C. Treadwell

Narrator: Jim Seybert

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 15 minutes

Release date: July 20, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 2 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 3 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The 'Wild West' developed in the years following the American Civil War. However, this period of myth-making cowboys, infamous gunslingers, not always law-abiding lawmen, and saloon madams, is as much the product of fiction writers and film makers as reality. Many of those who roamed America's West in the period between 1850 and 1900 often appear as colorful, romanticized, legendary characters. The majority of outlaws, though, were anonymous common criminals. In 1877, the State Adjutant General of Texas published 'wanted posters' for some 5,000 outlaws and bandits in the Rio Grande district alone, almost all of whom have since vanished into the mists of time. When it comes to the Wild West, it is important to separate fact from fiction. Of the known recorded killings by the various outlaws and gunfighters, Billy the Kid killed four men, not the twenty that some writers attributed to him. Clay Allison, however, was thought to have killed at least fifteen men in his time as a gunfighter, while some of the outlaw gangs were particularly violent and ruthless. The days of the outlaws of the Wild West gradually came to an end at the turn of the twentieth century. The legends, however, live on.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/504479 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Howe Dynasty: The Untold Story of a Military Family and the Women Behind Britain's Wars for America

Author: Julie Flavell

Narrator: Polly Lee

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 21 minutes

Release date: July 20, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Finalist • George Washington Book Prize New York Times Book Review • Editors’ Choice Finally revealing the family’s indefatigable women among its legendary military figures, The Howe Dynasty recasts the British side of the American Revolution. In December 1774, Benjamin Franklin met Caroline Howe, the sister of British General Sir William Howe and Richard Admiral Lord Howe, in a London drawing room for “half a dozen Games of Chess.” But as historian Julie Flavell reveals, these meetings were about much more than board games: they were cover for a last-ditch attempt to forestall the outbreak of the American War of Independence. Aware that the distinguished Howe family, both the men and the women, have been known solely for the military exploits of the brothers, Flavell investigated the letters of Caroline Howe, which have been blatantly overlooked since the nineteenth century. Using revelatory documents and this correspondence, The Howe Dynasty provides a groundbreaking reinterpretation of one of England’s most famous military families across four wars. Contemporaries considered the Howes impenetrable and intensely private—or, as Horace Walpole called them, “brave and silent.” Flavell traces their roots to modest beginnings at Langar Hall in rural Nottinghamshire and highlights the Georgian phenomenon of the politically involved aristocratic woman. In fact, the early careers of the brothers—George, Richard, and William—can be credited not to the maneuverings of their father, Scrope Lord Howe, but to those of their aunt, the savvy Mary Herbert Countess Pembroke. When eldest sister Caroline came of age during the reign of King George III, she too used her intimacy with the royal inner circle to promote her brothers, moving smoothly between a straitlaced court and an increasingly scandalous London high life. With genuine suspense, Flavell skillfully recounts the most notable episodes of the brothers’ military campaigns: how Richard, commanding the HMS Dunkirk in 1755, fired the first shot signaling the beginning of the Seven Years’ War at sea; how George won the devotion of the American fighters he commanded at Fort Ticonderoga just three years later; and how youngest brother General William Howe, his sympathies torn, nonetheless commanded his troops to a bitter Pyrrhic victory in the Battle of Bunker Hill, only to be vilified for his failure as British commander-in-chief to subdue Washington’s Continental Army. Britain’s desperate battles to guard its most vaunted colonial possession are here told in tandem with London parlor-room intrigues, where Caroline bravely fought to protect the Howe reputation in a gossipy aristocratic milieu. A riveting narrative and long overdue reassessment of the entire family, The Howe Dynasty forces us to reimagine the Revolutionary War in ways that would have been previously inconceivable.

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Title: Open Wounds: A Story of Racial Tragedy, Trauma, and Redemption

Author: Phil Allen Jr.

Narrator: Terrence Kidd

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 5 hours 31 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

On December 10, 1953, tragedy was visited on a family when Nathaniel Allen was murdered on the Sampit River by his white employer, who lured him into the meeting under the false promise of reconciliation. Allen's death was recorded as an accidental drowning, a deliberate cover-up of the bullet hole seen by more than one witness. Three generations later, Phil Allen Jr. revisits this harrowing story and recounts the 'baton of bitterness' that this murder passed down in his family. Through interviews, difficult conversations, and deep theological reflection, Allen takes up the challenge of racism today, naming it for what it is and working to chart a path toward reconciliation. Open Wounds, and the documentary that accompanies it, is a transformative experience of listening and learning as a grandson looks, laments, and ultimately leads his family and his society forward toward a just and reconciled future. It's an essential part of our national reckoning with racism and injustice.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/514016 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790-1870

Author: Daniel Carpenter

Narrator: Eric Michael Summerer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 22 hours 3 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Known as the age of democracy, the nineteenth century witnessed the extension of the franchise and the rise of party politics. As Daniel Carpenter shows, however, democracy in America emerged not merely through elections and parties, but through the transformation of an ancient political tool: the petition. A statement of grievance accompanied by a list of signatures, the petition afforded women and men excluded from formal politics the chance to make their voices heard and to reshape the landscape of political possibility. Democracy by Petition traces the explosion and expansion of petitioning across the North American continent. Indigenous tribes in Canada, free Blacks from Boston to the British West Indies, Irish canal workers in Indiana, and Hispanic settlers in territorial New Mexico all used petitions to make claims on those in power. Petitions facilitated the extension of suffrage, the decline of feudal land tenure, and advances in liberty for women, African Americans, and Indigenous peoples. Even where petitioners failed in their immediate aims, their campaigns advanced democracy by setting agendas, recruiting people into political causes, and fostering aspirations of equality. The coming of democracy in America owes much to the unprecedented energy with which the petition was employed in the antebellum period.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/506060 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: All Souls: A Family Story from Southie

Author: Michael Patrick Macdonald

Narrator: Michael Patrick Macdonald

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

Release date: July 13, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The anti-busing riots of 1974 forever changed Southie, Boston's working class Irish community, branding it as a violent, racist enclave. Michael Patrick MacDonald grew up in Southie's Old Colony housing project. He describes the way this world within a world felt to the troubled yet keenly gifted observer he was even as a child: '[as if] we were protected, as if the whole neighborhood was watching our backs for threats, watching for all the enemies we could never really define.' But the threats-poverty, drugs, a shadowy gangster world-were real. MacDonald lost four of his siblings to violence and poverty. All Souls is heart-breaking testimony to lives lost too early, and the story of how a place so filled with pain could still be 'the best place in the world.' We meet Ma, Michael's mini-skirted, accordian-playing, usually single mother who cares for her children—there are eventually eleven—through a combination of high spirits and inspired 'getting over.' And there are Michael's older siblings—Davey, sweet artist-dreamer; Kevin, child genius of scam; and Frankie, Golden Gloves boxer and neighborhood hero—whose lives are high-wire acts played out in a world of poverty and pride. But too soon Southie becomes a place controlled by resident gangster Whitey Bulger, later revealed to be an FBI informant even as he ran the drug culture that Southie supposedly never had. It was a world primed for the escalation of class violence-and then, with deadly and sickening inevitability, of racial violence that swirled around forced busing. MacDonald, eight years old when the riots hit, gives an explosive account of the asphalt warfare. He tells of feeling 'part of it all, part of something bigger than I'd ever imagined, part of something that was on the national news every night.' Within a few years-a sequence laid out in All Souls with mesmerizing urgency-the neighborhood's collapse is echoed by the MacDonald family's tragedies. All but destroyed by grief and by the Southie code that doesn't allow him to feel it, MacDonald gets out. His work as a peace activist, first in the all-Black neighborhoods of nearby Roxbury, then back to the Southie he can't help but love, is the powerfully redemptive close to a story that will leave readers utterly shaken and changed.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/521690 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Across the Airless Wilds: The Lunar Rover and the Triumph of the Final Moon Landings

Author: Earl Swift

Narrator: Adam Verner

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 7 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

“Earl Swift lays out this great unsung saga with verve and magisterial sweep.'' —Hampton Sides In this ''brilliantly observed'' (Newsweek) rediscovery of the final Apollo moon landings, the acclaimed author of Chesapeake Requiem reveals that these extraordinary yet overshadowed missions—distinguished by the use of the revolutionary lunar roving vehicle—deserve to be celebrated as the pinnacle of human adventure and exploration. 8:36 P.M. EST, December 12, 1972: Apollo 17 astronauts Gene Cernan and Jack Schmitt braked to a stop alongside Nansen Crater, keenly aware that they were far, far from home. They had flown nearly a quarter-million miles to the man in the moon’s left eye, landed at its edge, and then driven five miles in to this desolate, boulder-strewn landscape. As they gathered samples, they strode at the outermost edge of mankind’s travels. This place, this moment, marked the extreme of exploration for a species born to wander.  A few feet away sat the machine that made the achievement possible: an electric go-cart that folded like a business letter, weighed less than eighty pounds in the moon’s reduced gravity, and muscled its way up mountains, around craters, and over undulating plains on America’s last three ventures to the lunar surface.  In the decades since, the exploits of the astronauts on those final expeditions have dimmed in the shadow cast by the first moon landing. But Apollo 11 was but a prelude to what came later: while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin trod a sliver of flat lunar desert smaller than a football field, Apollos 15, 16, and 17 each commanded a mountainous area the size of Manhattan. All told, their crews traveled fifty-six miles, and brought deep science and a far more swashbuckling style of exploration to the moon. And they triumphed for one very American reason: they drove. In this fast-moving history of the rover and the adventures it ignited, Earl Swift puts the reader alongside the men who dreamed of driving on the moon and designed and built the vehicle, troubleshot its flaws, and drove it on the moon’s surface. Finally shining a deserved spotlight on these overlooked characters and the missions they created, Across the Airless Wilds is a celebration of human genius, perseverance, and daring.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/519252 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Worse Place than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation

Author: John Matteson

Narrator: David Colacci

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 21 hours 0 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Pulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America. December 1862 drove the United States toward a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics, and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved toward singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman, a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety, and Louisa May Alcott, a struggling writer seeking an authentic voice and her father's admiration, tended soldiers' wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, West Point cadet John Pelham achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/513390 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Three Days at Camp David: How a Secret Meeting in 1971 Transformed the Global Economy

Author: Jeffrey E. Garten

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Release date: July 6, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The former dean of the Yale School of Management and Undersecretary of Commerce in the Clinton administration chronicles the 1971 August meeting at Camp David, where President Nixon unilaterally ended the last vestiges of the gold standard—breaking the link between gold and the dollar—transforming the entire global monetary system. Over the course of three days—from August 13 to 15, 1971—at a secret meeting at Camp David, President Richard Nixon and his brain trust changed the course of history. Before that weekend, all national currencies were valued to the U.S. dollar, which was convertible to gold at a fixed rate. That system, established by the Bretton Woods Agreement at the end of World War II, was the foundation of the international monetary system that helped fuel the greatest expansion of middle-class prosperity the world has ever seen.   In making his decision, Nixon shocked world leaders, bankers, investors, traders and everyone involved in global finance. Jeffrey E. Garten argues that many of the roots of America’s dramatic retrenchment in world affairs began with that momentous event that was an admission that America could no longer afford to uphold the global monetary system. It opened the way for massive market instability and speculation that has plagued the world economy ever since, but at the same time it made possible the gigantic expansion of trade and investment across borders which created our modern era of once unimaginable progress. Based on extensive historical research and interviews with several participants at Camp David, and informed by Garten’s own insights from positions in four presidential administrations and on Wall Street, Three Days at Camp David chronicles this critical turning point, analyzes its impact on the American economy and world markets, and explores its ramifications now and for the future.  Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/522291 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South

Author: Stephanie M.H. Camp

Narrator: Diana Blue

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 23 minutes

Release date: June 29, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Recent scholarship has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ('frolics') become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/522256 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Between Freedom and Equality: The History of an African American Family in Washington, DC

Author: Barbara Boyle Torrey, Clara Myrick Green

Narrator: L. Malaika Cooper

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 39 minutes

Release date: June 29, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Between Freedom and Equality begins with the life of Capt. George Pointer, an enslaved African who purchased his freedom in 1793 while working for George Washington's Potomac Company. It follows the lives of six generations of his descendants as they lived and worked on the banks of the Potomac, in the port of Georgetown, and in a rural corner of the nation's capital. Between Freedom and Equality offers a moving and inspiring look at the challenges that free African Americans have faced in Washington, DC, since the district's founding. The story begins with an 1829 letter from Pointer that is preserved today in the National Archives. Inspired by Pointer's letter, authors Barbara Boyle Torrey and Clara Myrick Green began researching this remarkable man who was a boat captain and supervisory engineer for the Potomac canal system. The Pointer family faced many challenges—the fragility of freedom in a slaveholding society, racism, wars, floods, and epidemics—but their refuge was the small farm they purchased in what is now Chevy Chase. However, in the early twentieth century, the DC government used eminent domain to force the sale of their farm and replaced it with an all-white school. Between Freedom and Equality grants Pointer and his descendants their long-overdue place in American history.