Download Best Full-Length Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/506698 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War

Author: Jeff Shesol

Narrator: Jim Frangione

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.75 of Total 4

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A riveting history of the epic orbital flight that put America back into the space race.   If the United States couldn’t catch up to the Soviets in space, how could it compete with them on Earth? That was the question facing John F. Kennedy at the height of the Cold War—a perilous time when the Soviet Union built the wall in Berlin, tested nuclear bombs more destructive than any in history, and beat the United States to every major milestone in space. The race to the heavens seemed a race for survival—and America was losing.   On February 20, 1962, when John Glenn blasted into orbit aboard Friendship 7, his mission was not only to circle the planet; it was to calm the fears of the free world and renew America’s sense of self-belief. Mercury Rising re-creates the tension and excitement of a flight that shifted the momentum of the space race and put the United States on the path to the moon. Drawing on new archival sources, personal interviews, and previously unpublished notes by Glenn himself, Mercury Rising reveals how the astronaut’s heroics lifted the nation’s hopes in what Kennedy called the 'hour of maximum danger.'

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/506185 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Father James Page: An Enslaved Preacher's Climb to Freedom

Author: Larry Eugene

Narrator: Terrence Kidd

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 30 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

James Page spent the majority of his life enslaved—during which time he experienced the death of his free father, witnessed his mother and brother being sold on the auction block, and was forcibly moved 700 miles south from Richmond, Virginia, to Tallahassee, Florida, by his enslaver, John Parkhill. Page would go on to become Parkhill's chief aide on his plantation and, unusually, a religious leader who was widely respected by enslaved men and women as well as by white clergy, educators, and politicians. Rare for enslaved people at the time, Page was literate—and left behind ten letters that focused on his philosophy as an enslaved preacher and, later, as a free minister, educator, politician, and social justice advocate. In Father James Page, Larry Eugene Rivers presents Page as a complex, conflicted man: neither a nonthreatening, accommodationist mouthpiece for white supremacy nor a calculating schemer fomenting rebellion. Rivers emphasizes Page's agency in pursuing a religious vocation, in seeking to exhibit 'manliness' in the face of chattel slavery, and in pushing back against the overwhelming power of his enslaver. Post-emancipation, Page continued to preach and to advocate for black self-determination and independence through black land ownership, political participation, and business ownership.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/503600 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Kennedy's Avenger: Assassination, Conspiracy, and the Forgotten Trial of Jack Ruby

Author: Dan Abrams, David Fisher

Narrator: Roger Wayne, Dan Abrams

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 27 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.09 of Total 11

Ratings of Narrator: 3.5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

New York Times bestselling authors Dan Abrams and David Fisher bring to life the incredible story of one of America’s most publicized—and most surprising—criminal trials in history. No crime in history had more eyewitnesses. On November 24, 1963, two days after the killing of President Kennedy, a troubled nightclub owner named Jack Ruby quietly slipped into the Dallas police station and assassinated the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Millions of Americans witnessed the killing on live television, and yet the event would lead to questions for years to come. It also would help to spark the conspiracy theories that have continued to resonate today. Under the long shadow cast by the assassination of America’s beloved president, few would remember the bizarre trial that followed three months later in Dallas, Texas. How exactly does one defend a man who was seen pulling the trigger in front of millions? And, more important, how did Jack Ruby, who fired point-blank into Oswald live on television, die an innocent man? Featuring a colorful cast of characters, including the nation’s most flamboyant lawyer pitted against a tough-as-Texas prosecutor, award-winning authors Dan Abrams and David Fisher unveil the astonishing details behind the first major trial of the television century. While it was Jack Ruby who appeared before the jury, it was also the city of Dallas and the American legal system being judged by the world.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/516500 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Edited and Abridged

Series: #1 of Perceptions on Truth and Reconciliation

Author: Phil Fontaine, Aimée Craft, Truth & Reconciliation Commission Of Canada

Narrator: Michelle St. John

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

Release date: May 30, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.67 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

"It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer." So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7000 survivor statements and five million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources. A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Research Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, gathers material from the several reports the TRC has produced to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools in a concise and accessible package that includes new materials to help inform and contextualize the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon. Survivor and former National Chief of the Assembly First Nations, Phil Fontaine, provides a Foreword, and an Afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, home to the archive of recordings, and documents collected by the TRC. As Aimée Craft writes in the Afterword, knowing the historical backdrop of residential schooling and its legacy is essential to the work of reconciliation. In the past, agents of the Canadian state knocked on the doors of Indigenous families to take the children to school. Now, the Survivors have shared their truths and knocked back. It is time for Canadians to open the door to mutual understanding, respect, and reconciliation.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/525017 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Heartless Murder of Nettie Sachs: And The Survival Of Her American Dream

Author: Dr. Robert V.V. Hurst

Narrator: Lee Alan

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 34 minutes

Release date: May 28, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Born in Lithuania in 1885 under the rule of Russian Tsars, Nettie was ever aware of the injustice levied on her Jewish people. Rules limited their freedom reducing their status to that of second-class citizens. Additionally, Nettie challenged her own religion’s system of excluding girls from Talmud instruction, which the male-dominated Jewish society deemed to be the exclusive right of men. Nettie fled to America with Russian Cossacks hot on her trail for a murder that occurred during a pogrom while she was defending her husband. In America, she found opportunity but not without its perils. She took advantage of America’s freedoms and became educated, continuing to navigate the male dominated society with her resolve to live the American Dream. Nettie’s natural sexuality and intelligence attracted five husbands and produced six children, who in turn contributed twelve grandchildren. This was her legacy to America. Her life’s story unfolded as her adopted country fought two wars, saw the start of the union movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and segregation, and adjusted to an immigrant crisis. Tragically, Nettie a young widow lost her life at age 37 at the hands of the son of a man whose romantic interest she had rejected years before in the old country. Envious of her newfound wealth, he was determined to claim it as his own. He sent his son, 13 years younger than Nettie, to court her, then marry her. Evil occult forces seemed to follow Nettie’s every move after her third marriage, only ending with her death after the fifth. The sensational trial of her last husband for her violent murder was followed in newspapers across the country. Her life in America played out against a backdrop of the Roaring Twenties, Prohibition, bootleg liquor, ragtime music, and speakeasies. Nettie became in her mind, and in reality, a true American. She did her best to raise her children and instill in them her passion for justice and freedom.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/520466 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Eric Rauchway

Narrator: Richard M. Davidson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 4 hours 45 minutes

Release date: May 25, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The New Deal shaped our nation's politics for decades, and was seen by many as tantamount to the 'American Way' itself. Now, in this superb compact history, Eric Rauchway offers an informed account of the New Deal and the Great Depression, illuminating its successes and failures. Rauchway first describes how the roots of the Great Depression lay in America's post-war economic policies—described as 'laissez-faire with a vengeance'—which in effect isolated our nation from the world economy just when the world needed the United States most. He shows how the magnitude of the resulting economic upheaval, and the ineffectiveness of the old ways of dealing with financial hardships, set the stage for Roosevelt's vigorous (and sometimes unconstitutional) Depression-fighting policies. Indeed, Rauchway stresses that the New Deal only makes sense as a response to this global economic disaster. The book examines a key sampling of New Deal programs, ranging from the National Recovery Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission, to the Public Works Administration and Social Security, revealing why some worked and others did not. In the end, Rauchway concludes, it was the coming of World War II that finally generated the political will to spend the massive amounts of public money needed to put Americans back to work.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/514091 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction (2nd Edition)

Author: Robert J. Mcmahon

Narrator: Stephen Bel Davies

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 39 minutes

Release date: May 25, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The Cold War dominated international life from the end of World War II to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But how did the conflict begin? Why did it move from its initial origins in Postwar Europe to encompass virtually every corner of the globe? And why, after lasting so long, did the war end so suddenly and unexpectedly? Robert McMahon considers these questions and more, as well as looking at the legacy of the Cold War and its impact on international relations today. The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction is a truly international history, not just of the Soviet-American struggle at its heart, but also of the waves of decolonization, revolutionary nationalism, and state formation that swept the non-Western world in the wake of World War II. McMahon places the 'Hot Wars' that cost millions of lives in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere within the larger framework of global superpower competition. He shows how the United States and the Soviet Union both became empires over the course of the Cold War, and argues that perceived security needs and fears shaped US and Soviet decisions from the beginning—far more, in fact, than did their economic and territorial ambitions. He unpacks how these needs and fears were conditioned by the divergent cultures, ideologies, and historical experiences of the two principal contestants and their allies.

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Title: The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans

Author: Jonathan Scott Holloway

Narrator: William Andrew Quinn

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 4 hours 7 minutes

Release date: May 25, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being 'American' means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called 'the cause of freedom.' It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/514075 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation

Author: Kirsten Fischer

Narrator: Nan Mcnamara

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 48 minutes

Release date: May 25, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

When the United States was new, a lapsed minister named Elihu Palmer shared with his fellow Americans the radical idea that virtue required no religious foundation. A better source for morality, he said, could be found in the natural world. For this, his Christian critics denounced him as a heretic whose ideas endangered the country. One of the most infamous American freethinkers in his day, Elihu Palmer has been largely forgotten. No cache of his personal papers exists and his book has been long out of print. Yet his story merits telling, Kirsten Fischer argues, and not only for the dramatic account of a man who lost his eyesight before the age of thirty and still became a book author, newspaper editor, and itinerant public speaker. Palmer's 'heresy' tested the nation's recently proclaimed commitment to freedom of religion and of speech. Fischer reveals that Palmer engaged in person and in print with an array of freethinkers—some famous, others now obscure. This first comprehensive biography of Palmer draws on extensive archival research to tell the life story of a freethinker who was at the heart of the new nation's protracted contest over religious freedom and free speech—a debate that continues to resonate today.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/512133 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Grant’s Tomb: The Epic Death of Ulysses S. Grant and the Making of an American Pantheon

Author: Louis L. Picone

Narrator: Robert Fass

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 0 minutes

Release date: May 25, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The final resting place of Ulysses S. Grant, the victorious general in the Civil War and the eighteenth president of the United States, is a colossal neoclassical tomb located in the most dynamic city in the country. It is larger than the final resting place of any other president or any other person in America. Since its creation, the popularity and condition of this monument have reflected not only Grant's legacy in the public mind but also the state of New York City and of the Union. In this fascinating, deeply researched book, presidential historian Louis L. Picone recounts the full story. He begins with Grant's heroic final battle during the last year of his life, to complete his memoirs in order to secure his family's financial future while contending with painful, incurable cancer. Grant accomplished this just days before his death, and his memoirs, published by Mark Twain, became a bestseller. Picone narrates the national response to Grant's passing and how his tomb came to be: the intense competition to be the resting place for Grant's remains, the origins of the memorial and its design, the struggle to finance and build it over the course of twelve years, and the vicissitudes of its afterlife in the history of the nation up to recent times.