Download Best Sellers Audiobooks in History, American

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Title: World War I, Part 2

Author: Ralph Raico

Narrator: George C. Scott

Format: Unabridged

Length: 2 hrs and 44 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-09-06

Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 21 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

In Europe, power was poised in balance. Germany longed to become a weltmacht, a world power. Britain struggled to preserve her empire. Both France and Russia expanded, and the Balkan states agitated for independence from Austria. Treaties were signed; alliances were consummated. Now the actions of any one power would determine the foreign policy of the others.

By early August 1914, the world was convulsed by the first world war, which engulfed Europe. On the western front, there was constant carnage, but little movement. Soldiers bled and died to win a stretch of dirt, which was quickly lost again. Europe seemed to be deadlocked in a bloodletting frenzy. As the nation-states battled, they awaited the response of the greatest of the neutral powers: the United States.

Halfway across the world, an officially neutral American was being drawn into the conflict. On May 7, 1915, a German U-boat sank the British ship Lusitania, and 1,200 people died, including 128 Americans. Diplomatic relations between Germany and America slowly decayed until, finally, President Wilson ordered American merchant ships to be armed. Within days, U-boats opened fire on American streamers. On April 6, 1917, the U.S. declared war on Germany. And at the 11th hour of the 11th day of November 1918, the guns fell silent. Germany had surrendered.

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Title: Thirty Years of Treason, Vol. 3

Subtitle: Excerpts From Hearings Before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, 1953 - 1968

Author: Eric Bentley

Narrator: Gabrielle de Cuir, Nathan Dana Aldrich, Roscoe Lee Browne, Robertson Dean, Richard Gilliland, Stephen Hoye

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 29 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-04-14

Publisher: Skyboat Media, Inc.

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

A chilling reenactment of the federal government's anti-Communist investigations.

The testimony that the author has gleaned for this audiobook from the 30-year record of the House Un-American Activities Committee focuses on HUAC's treatment of artists, intellectuals, and performers. This highly listenable and absorbing collection of significant excerpts from the hearings shows with painful clarity how HUAC grew from a panel that investigated possible subversive activities in a "dignified" manner to a huge, unrelenting accusatory finger from which almost no one was safe. Thirty Years of Treason serves as a warning for the future and creates living history from the documentary record.

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Title: The Earth Is Weeping

Subtitle: Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher Indian Wars Before the American Revolution

Author: World Watch Media

Narrator: Kimberly Hughey

Format: Unabridged

Length: 41 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-06-17

Publisher: World Watch Media

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Researchers do not know how many people lived in the Americas before the arrival of the European conquistadors. However, they continue their investigation in order to find out the exact number of the aboriginal people who inhabited the continents. So far, scholars who have been trying to determine how many Native Americans lived on the North American territory before the arrival of Columbus estimate the number to be between 1.2 million and 18 million people. According to the census from 2010, about 3 million individuals identified themselves as Native or Alaskan Americans, which represents less than 1 percent of the entire population of the United States. Many causes have contributed to the massive decline of the native population. One of the largest cause was the infectious diseases European explorers and traders brought with them on the newly discovered continent. Although the Europeans have developed some immunity to chronic infections, which were common on their continent, the results were devastating to America's natives. Many estimate that infections ravaged the continents, while smallpox alone killed over 80 percent of them. Additional causes include conflicts with Europeans in individual fights and wars, tribal wars, assimilation, migration to Mexico and Canada, and declining birth rates. In the 19th century, about 500,000 Native Americans lived on the United States soil.

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Title: Last of the Blue and Gray

Subtitle: Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery That Outlived the Civil War

Author: Richard A. Serrano

Narrator: Dan John Miller

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-08-13

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 6 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117, blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending. Unknown to the public, centennial officials, and the White House too, one of these men was indeed a veteran of that horrible conflict and one, according to the best evidence, nothing but a fraud. One was a soldier. The other had been living a great, big lie.

Critic Reviews:

"Told with clarity and skillfully paced, Serrano's story of two old men and the mythology that grew up around them is intimate, expansive, and thoroughly entertaining." (Publishers Weekly)

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Title: Emancipation Hell

Subtitle: The Tragedy Wrought by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation

Author: Kirkpatrick Sale

Narrator: Kirkpatrick Sale

Format: Unabridged

Length: 2 hrs and 44 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-10-17

Publisher: Shotwell Publishing LLC

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Emancipation - freeing the slaves - hell? The Emancipation Proclamation - one of the sacred icons of American history - a tragedy? How can this be?

That was the opinion of Frederick Douglass, the most important African American leader of the 19th century, who proclaimed, "I denounce the so-called Emancipation."

Douglass wrote: "I admit that the Negro...has made little progress from barbarism to civilization, and that he is in a deplorable condition since his emancipation. That he is worse off in many respects, than when he was a slave, I am compelled to admit..."

Indeed, social statistics of 1900 indicate that material quality of life was lower for most black Americans than under slavery.

Kirkpatrick Sale marshals much forgotten evidence to cast this glorious part of American history in a realistic and critical light. Emancipation, yes. But as a military measure during a cruel war of invasion?

Slavery once existed throughout the western hemisphere, but almost everywhere except the United States, it ended peacefully. Emancipation with no thought or plan for the unprecedented situation to be managed? With no real sympathy or interest in the people freed except their usefulness in controlling and exploiting the conquered South? (Some Northern leaders denounced the Proclamation as an atrocity and an estimated 200,000 Northerners deserted or evaded service in a war for African Americans rather than for the "Union.")

Perhaps never in history, Kirkpatrick Sale demonstrates, has a benevolent act been so tainted with impure motives and disdain of consequences.

Abraham Lincoln has a lot to answer for, says the author. His flawed proclamation doomed Americans to a century and a half of racial conflict and disparity that is still with us.

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Title: The Republic of Rock

Subtitle: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture

Author: Michael J. Kramer

Narrator: Lance Axt

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-03-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

In his 1967 megahit "San Francisco," Scott McKenzie sang of "people in motion" coming from all across the country to San Francisco, the white-hot center of rock music and anti-war protests. At the same time, another large group of young Americans was also in motion, less eagerly, heading for the jungles of Vietnam. Now, in The Republic of Rock, Michael Kramer draws on new archival sources and interviews to explore sixties music and politics through the lens of these two generation-changing places - San Francisco and Vietnam. From the Acid Tests of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters to hippie disc jockeys on strike, the military's use of rock music to "boost morale" in Vietnam, and the forgotten tale of a South Vietnamese rock band, The Republic of Rock shows how the musical connections between the City of the Summer of Love and war-torn Southeast Asia were crucial to the making of the sixties counterculture.

The audiobook also illustrates how and why the legacy of rock music in the sixties continues to matter to the meaning of citizenship in a global society today. Going beyond cliched narratives about sixties music, Kramer argues that rock became a way for participants in the counterculture to think about what it meant to be an American citizen, a world citizen, a citizen-consumer, or a citizen-soldier. The music became a resource for grappling with the nature of democracy in larger systems of American power both domestically and globally. For anyone interested in the 1960s, popular music, and American culture and counterculture, The Republic of Rock offers new insight into the many ways rock music has shaped our ideas of individual freedom and collective belonging.

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Title: April 19, 1775: The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere and the Battles of Lexington & Concord

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Michael Piotrasch

Format: Unabridged

Length: 2 hrs and 6 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-09-15

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

"Out started six officers, seized my bridle, put their pistols to my breast, ordered me to dismount, which I did. One of them, who appeared to have the command there, and much of a gentleman, asked me where I came from; I told him. He asked what time I left . I told him, he seemed surprised, said 'Sir, may I crave your name?' I answered 'My name is Revere.'" (Paul Revere)

April 19, 1775, was one of the most momentous days in American history. Over the course of nearly 18 hours, a morning that began with midnight riders spreading an alarm about a British raid headed for Concord would lead to the British column fleeing for their lives. By the time the sun went down, 10 years of strife between the 13 colonies and Great Britain finally boiled over into revolution.

In the wake of the revolution, the importance of April 19, 1775, became clear to everyone, and the legends and mystique surrounding that day have grown ever since. That day made an icon out of Paul Revere, who would have been greatly surprised at the end of his life if he had known he would become famous for his midnight ride. As a fervent and well-connected patriot who was part of Boston's intelligence network, Revere was sent on the ride toward Lexington along with William Dawes, with the intention of warning the countryside that British troops were heading that way.

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Title: The Fort Pillow Massacre

Subtitle: The History and Legacy of the Civil War's Most Notorious Battle

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Troy McElfresh

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 40 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-24-15

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Ratings: 2 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

At the end of 1863, Confederate cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest began operations in west Tennessee with a small unit, but he managed to recruit several thousand volunteers, including a number of veteran soldiers, and he whipped them into shape so they were combat ready before their first confrontation. Upon hearing of Forrests growing aptitude for adaptive warfare, General Sherman wrote to Union commander in chief Henry Halleck that men like Forrest were "men that must all be killed or employed by us before we can hope for peace. They have no property or future, and therefore cannot be influenced by anything except personal considerations". Sherman repeatedly ordered his Memphis commanders to catch "that devil Forrest", essentially putting a bounty on his head.

As far as skirmishes go, Fort Pillow was a completely unremarkable fight. Before attacking, Forrest demanded the unconditional surrender of the Union garrison, a normal custom of his, and he warned the Union commanding officer that he would not be responsible for his soldiers' actions if the warning went unheeded. What made Fort Pillow markedly different was that a sizable amount of the Union garrison defending the Fort was comprised of black soldiers, which particularly enraged Confederate soldiers whenever they encountered those they viewed as former slaves in the field.

It is still unclear exactly how the fighting unfolded, but what is clear is that an unusually high percentage of Union soldiers were killed, and the Confederates were accused of massacring black soldiers after they had surrendered. Primary sources tell conflicting accounts of what happened at Battle of Fort Pillow, leaving scholars to piece together the battle and determine whether Confederate soldiers purposely shot Union soldiers after they had surrendered. The Fort Pillow Massacre: The History and Legacy of the Civil War's Most Notorious Battle chronicles the history of the Civil War's most infamous massacre.

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