Download Best Full-Length Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/519216 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity

Author: James C. Cobb

Narrator: David Stifel

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 20 hours 54 minutes

Release date: September 28, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

'Cotton obsessed, Negro obsessed,' Rupert Vance called it in 1935. 'Nowhere but in the Mississippi Delta,' he said, 'are antebellum conditions so nearly preserved.' This crescent of bottomlands between Memphis and Vicksburg, lined by the Yazoo and Mississippi rivers, remains in some ways what it was in 1860: a land of rich soil, wealthy planters, and desperate poverty—the blackest and poorest counties in all the South. And yet it is a cultural treasure house as well—the home of Muddy Waters, B. B. King, Charley Pride, Walker Percy, Elizabeth Spencer, and Shelby Foote. Painting a fascinating portrait of the development and survival of the Mississippi Delta, a society and economy that is often seen as the most extreme in all the South, James C. Cobb offers a comprehensive history of the Delta, from its first white settlement in the 1820s to the present. Exploring the rich black culture of the Delta, Cobb explains how it survived and evolved in the midst of poverty and oppression, beginning with the first settlers in the overgrown, disease-ridden Delta before the Civil War to the bitter battles and incomplete triumphs of the civil rights era. In this comprehensive account, Cobb offers new insight into 'the most southern place on earth,' untangling the enigma of grindingly poor but prolifically creative Mississippi Delta.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/513920 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History

Author: Anne C. Bailey

Narrator: Machelle Williams

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 59 minutes

Release date: September 28, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In 1859, at the largest recorded slave auction in American history, over 400 men, women, and children were sold by the Butler Plantation estates. This book is one of the first to analyze the operation of this auction and trace the lives of slaves before, during, and after their sale. Immersing herself in the personal papers of the Butlers, accounts from journalists that witnessed the auction, genealogical records, and oral histories, Anne C. Bailey weaves together a narrative that brings the auction to life. Demonstrating the resilience of African American families, she includes interviews from the living descendants of slaves sold on the auction block, showing how the memories of slavery have shaped people's lives today. Using the auction as the focal point, The Weeping Time is a compelling and nuanced narrative of one of the most pivotal eras in American history, and how its legacy persists today.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/524643 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

Author: Joseph J. Ellis

Narrator: Graham Winton

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 37 minutes

Release date: September 21, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.33 of Total 6

Ratings of Narrator: 4.67 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In one of the most “exciting and engaging” (Gordon S. Wood) histories of the American founding in decades, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Joseph J. Ellis offers an epic account of the origins and clashing ideologies of America’s revolutionary era, recovering a war more brutal, and more disorienting, than any in our history, save perhaps the Civil War.For more than two centuries, historians have debated the history of the American Revolution, disputing its roots, its provenance, and above all, its meaning. These questions have intrigued Ellis—one of our most celebrated scholars of American history—throughout his entire career. With this much-anticipated volume, he at last brings the story of the revolution to vivid life, with “surprising relevance” (Susan Dunn) for our modern era. Completing a trilogy of books that began with Founding Brothers, The Cause returns us to the very heart of the American founding, telling the military and political story of the war for independence from the ground up, and from all sides: British and American, loyalist and patriot, white and Black.Taking us from the end of the Seven Years’ War to 1783, and drawing on a wealth of previously untapped sources, The Cause interweaves action-packed tales of North American military campaigns with parlor-room schemes and chicanery, creating a thrilling narrative that brings together a cast of familiar and long-forgotten characters. Here Ellis recovers the stories of Catharine Littlefield Greene, wife of Major General Nathanael Greene, the sister among the “band of brothers”; Thayendanegea, a Mohawk chief known to the colonists as Joseph Brant, who led the Iroquois Confederation against the Patriots; and Harry Washington, the enslaved namesake of George Washington, who escaped Mount Vernon to join the British Army and fight against his former master.Countering popular histories that romanticize the “Spirit of ’76,” Ellis demonstrates that the rebels fought under the mantle of “The Cause,” a mutable, conveniently ambiguous principle that afforded an umbrella under which different, and often conflicting, convictions and goals could coexist. Neither an American nation nor a viable government existed at the end of the war. In fact, one revolutionary legacy regarded the creation of such a nation, or any robust expression of government power, as the ultimate betrayal of The Cause. This legacy alone rendered any effective response to the twin tragedies of the founding—slavery and the Native American dilemma—problematic at best.Written with the vivid and muscular prose for which Ellis is known, and with characteristically trenchant insight, The Cause marks the culmination of a lifetime of engagement with the founding era. A landmark work of narrative history, it challenges the story we have long told ourselves about our origins as a people, and as a nation.

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Title: Those Who Know Don't Say: The Nation of Islam, the Black Freedom Movement, and the Carceral State

Author: Garrett Felber

Narrator: Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 40 minutes

Release date: September 21, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Challenging incarceration and policing was central to the postwar Black Freedom Movement. In this bold new political and intellectual history of the Nation of Islam, Garrett Felber centers the Nation in the Civil Rights Era and the making of the modern carceral state. In doing so, he reveals a multifaceted freedom struggle that focused as much on policing and prisons as on school desegregation and voting rights. The book examines efforts to build broad-based grassroots coalitions among liberals, radicals, and nationalists to oppose the carceral state and struggle for local Black self-determination. It captures the ambiguous place of the Nation of Islam specifically, and Black nationalist organizing more broadly, during an era which has come to be defined by nonviolent resistance, desegregation campaigns, and racial liberalism. By provocatively documenting the interplay between law enforcement and Muslim communities, Felber decisively shows how state repression and Muslim organizing laid the groundwork for the modern carceral state and the contemporary prison abolition movement which opposes it. Exhaustively researched, the book illuminates new sites and forms of political struggle as Muslims prayed under surveillance in prison yards and used courtroom political theater to put the state on trial.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/502037 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Forgotten First: Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, Marion Motley, Bill Willis, and the Breaking of the NFL Color Barrier

Author: Keyshawn Johnson, Bob Glauber

Narrator: Rhett Samuel Price

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

Release date: September 21, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The unknown story of the Black pioneers who collectively changed the face of the NFL in 1946. THE FORGOTTEN FIRST chronicles the lives of four incredible men, the racism they experienced as Black players entering a segregated sport, the burden of expectation they carried, and their many achievements, which would go on to affect football for generations to come. More than a year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball, there was another seismic moment in pro sports history. On March 21,1946, former UCLA star running back Kenny Washington—a teammate of Robinson's in college—signed a contract with the Los Angeles Rams. This ended one of the most shameful periods in NFL history, when African-American players were banned from league play. Washington would not be alone in serving as a pioneer for NFL integration. Just months after he joined the Rams, thanks to a concerted effort by influential Los Angeles political and civic leaders, the team signed Woody Strode, who played with both Washington and Robinson at UCLA in one of the most celebrated backfields in college sports history. And that same year, a little-known coach named Paul Brown of the fledgling Cleveland Browns signed running back Marion Motley and defensive lineman Bill Willis, thereby integrating a startup league that would eventually merge with the NFL. THE FORGOTTEN FIRST tells the story of one of the most significant cultural shifts in pro football history, as four men opened the door to opportunity and changed the sport forever.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/534708 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Space Force!: A Quirky and Opinionated Look at America's Newest Military Service

Author: Taylor Dinerman

Narrator: Jeffrey Kafer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 12 minutes

Release date: September 14, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The United States Space Force has a noble mission—to protect America, to support our allies, and to support our nation's interest as we, along with other nations, move out into the little patch of the universe that is our home system. The desire to establish a US Space Force has been around for decades, in both science fiction and in the minds of people who attempt to seriously consider what our nation needs in order to deter future wars (and if necessary, to fight and win them). As an institution, the US Space Force has gotten off to a shaky start; however, prolific space writer Taylor Dinerman has great confidence that someday soon, it will find the right leadership and eventually be emancipated from the Department of the Air Force. At that point, the institution can begin to truly serve the great cause of creating a spacefaring civilization—as it was always meant to.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/532093 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies

Author: Paul Gardullo, Kinshasha Holman Conwill

Narrator: Karen Chilton

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Release date: September 14, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The companion volume to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture exhibit, opening in September 2021 With a Foreword by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian Eric Foner and a preface by veteran museum director and historian Spencer Crew An incisive and illuminating analysis of the enduring legacy of the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction—a comprehensive story of Black Americans’ struggle for human rights and dignity and the failure of the nation to fulfill its promises of freedom, citizenship, and justice. In the aftermath of the Civil War, millions of free and newly freed African Americans were determined to define themselves as equal citizens in a country without slavery—to own land, build secure families, and educate themselves and their children. Seeking to secure safety and justice, they successfully campaigned for civil and political rights, including the right to vote. Across an expanding America, Black politicians were elected to all levels of government, from city halls to state capitals to Washington, DC. But those gains were short-lived. By the mid-1870s, the federal government stopped enforcing civil rights laws, allowing white supremacists to use suppression and violence to regain power in the Southern states. Black men, women, and children suffered racial terror, segregation, and discrimination that confined them to second-class citizenship, a system known as Jim Crow that endured for decades.   More than a century has passed since the revolutionary political, social, and economic movement known as Reconstruction, yet its profound consequences reverberate in our lives today. Make Good the Promises explores five distinct yet intertwined legacies of Reconstruction—Liberation, Violence, Repair, Place, and Belief—to reveal their lasting impact on modern society. It is the story of Frederick Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hiram Revels, Ida B. Wells, and scores of other Black men and women who reshaped a nation—and of the persistence of white supremacy and the perpetuation of the injustices of slavery continued by other means and codified in state and federal laws. With contributions by leading scholars, and illustrated with 80 images from the exhibition, Make Good the Promises shows how Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName, antiracism, and other current movements for repair find inspiration from the lessons of Reconstruction. It touches on questions critical then and now: What is the meaning of freedom and equality? What does it mean to be an American? Powerful and eye-opening, it is a reminder that history is far from past; it lives within each of us and shapes our world and who we are. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook. If you're looking for a thoughtful gift for a history buff, teacher, or anyone interested in social justice and anti-racism, Make Good the Promises is an excellent choice. This nonfiction book offers a comprehensive look at the aftermath of the Civil War and the struggle for civil and political rights for newly freed African Americans, with a focus on the lasting impact of Reconstruction on modern society.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/524629 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature

Author: Farah Jasmine Griffin

Narrator: Farah Jasmine Griffin

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 56 minutes

Release date: September 14, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A BRILLIANT SCHOLAR IMPARTS THE LESSONS BEQUEATHED BY THE BLACK COMMUNITY AND ITS REMARKABLE ARTISTS AND THINKERS.Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase “read until you understand,” a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of words and love of the magnificence of Black life.Griffin has spent years rooted in the culture of Black genius and the legacy of books that her father left her. A beloved professor, she has devoted herself to passing these works and their wisdom on to generations of students.Here, she shares a lifetime of discoveries: the ideas that inspired the stunning oratory of Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X, the soulful music of Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, the daring literature of Phillis Wheatley and Toni Morrison, the inventive artistry of Romare Bearden, and many more. Exploring these works through such themes as justice, rage, self-determination, beauty, joy, and mercy allows her to move from her aunt’s love of yellow roses to Gil Scott-Heron’s “Winter in America.”Griffin entwines memoir, history, and art while she keeps her finger on the pulse of the present, asking us to grapple with the continuing struggle for Black freedom and the ongoing project that is American democracy. She challenges us to reckon with our commitment to all the nation’s inhabitants and our responsibilities to all humanity.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/519210 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: How It Feels to Be Free: Black Women Entertainers and the Civil Rights Movement

Author: Ruth Feldstein

Narrator: Adenrele Ojo

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Release date: September 14, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In 1964, Nina Simone sat at a piano in New York's Carnegie Hall to play what she called a 'show tune.' Simone, and her song, became icons of the civil rights movement. But her confrontational style was not the only path taken by black women entertainers. In How It Feels to Be Free, Ruth Feldstein examines celebrated black women performers, illuminating the risks they took, their roles at home and abroad, and the ways that they raised the issue of gender amid their demands for black liberation. Feldstein focuses on six women who made names for themselves in the music, film, and television industries: Simone, Lena Horne, Miriam Makeba, Abbey Lincoln, Diahann Carroll, and Cicely Tyson. These women did not simply mirror black activism; their performances helped constitute the era's political history. Makeba connected America's struggle for civil rights to the fight against apartheid in South Africa, while Simone sparked high-profile controversy with her incendiary lyrics. In 1968, Hollywood cast the outspoken Lincoln as a maid to a white family in For Love of Ivy. That same year, Diahann Carroll took on the starring role in the television series Julia. How It Feels to Be Free demonstrates that entertainment was not always just entertainment and that 'We Shall Overcome' was not the only soundtrack to the civil rights movement.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/509279 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

Author: Edward E. Baptist

Narrator: Ron Butler

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 47 minutes

Release date: September 14, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the 2015 Avery O. Craven Prize from the Organization of American Historians Winner of the 2015 Sidney Hillman Prize A groundbreaking history demonstrating that America's economic supremacy was built on the backs of enslaved people Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution -- the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States. In the span of a single lifetime, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out tobacco plantations to a continental cotton empire, and the United States grew into a modern, industrial, and capitalist economy. Told through the intimate testimonies of survivors of slavery, plantation records, newspapers, as well as the words of politicians and entrepreneurs, The Half Has Never Been Told offers a radical new interpretation of American history.