Get Your Favorite Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/605378 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Birchers: How the John Birch Society Radicalized the American Right

Author: Matthew Dallek

Narrator: Donald Corren

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

Release date: March 21, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

How a notorious far right organization set the Republican Party on a long march toward extremism   At the height of the John Birch Society’s activity in the 1960s, critics dismissed its members as a paranoid fringe. After all, “Birchers” believed that a vast communist conspiracy existed in America and posed an existential threat to Christianity, capitalism, and freedom. But as historian Matthew Dallek reveals, the Birch Society’s extremism remade American conservatism. Most Birchers were white professionals who were radicalized as growing calls for racial and gender equality appeared to upend American life. Conservative leaders recognized that these affluent voters were needed to win elections, and for decades the GOP courted Birchers and their extremist successors. The far right steadily gained power, finally toppling the Republican establishment and electing Donald Trump.   Birchers is a deeply researched and indispensable new account of the rise of extremism in the United States.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/624476 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Norman Rockwell's Models: In and Out of the Studio

Author: S.T. Haggerty

Narrator: Grover Gardner

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 17 minutes

Release date: March 15, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In 1940, America’s favorite illustrator Norman Rockwell, his wife Mary, and their three sons moved to the picturesque rural village of West Arlington, Vermont. The artist discovered a treasure trove of models. Norman Rockwell’s Models: In and out of the Studio is the first to detail these models’ lives, friendships with the artist, and experiences in his studio. Dressed in quaint work clothing, the models were dairy farmers, carpenters, country doctors, soldiers, and mechanics. Norman Rockwell’s Models features nonfiction narratives telling the story of these folks during an era when they helped the war effort, farmed with horses, and received home visits from doctors. The book also describes the challenges the models faced in their own lives and how these affected their expressions in the paintings. For example, in several 1945 masterpieces, the jubilance Americans felt after the close of the second word war is revealed in their faces. Upon meeting people, young or old, the artist would say, “Call Me Norman.” Rockwell learned the models’ roles in the community and their personalities, which fostered genuine paintings. He strove, for example, to find real-life soldiers to model as WWII heroes and spirited boys and girls for lively paintings. In the studio, Norman was charming and polite but painstaking. He demonstrated poses and did whatever was necessary to evoke his trademark expressions, including telling stories of his own life, sometimes laughing or crying. Spending entire summers at his family’s farmhouse near West Arlington, Vermont, the author, S. T. Haggerty, grew up knowing many models, including those who posed for such iconic works as Freedom of Speech, Breaking Home Ties, and Girl at the Mirror. Along with models and their families, the author hayed the scenic fields in the Batten Kill River Valley and swam under the red covered bridge on the Village Green. This experiences give him a unique perspective for telling this story.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/625072 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Formidable: American Women and the Fight for Equality, 1920–2020

Author: Elisabeth Griffith

Narrator: Elisabeth Griffith

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 13 minutes

Release date: February 28, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The Nineteenth Amendment was an incomplete victory. Black and white women fought hard for voting rights and doubled the number of eligible voters, but the amendment did not enfranchise all women or even protect the rights of those women who could vote. A century later, women are still grappling with how to use the vote and their political power to expand civil rights, confront racial violence, improve maternal health, advance educational and employment opportunities, and secure reproductive rights. Formidable chronicles the efforts of white and Black women to advance sometimes competing causes. Black women wanted the rights enjoyed by whites. They wanted to protect their communities from racial violence and discrimination. Theirs was not solely a women’s movement. White women wanted to be equal to white men. They sought equal legal rights, political power, safeguards for working women and immigrants, and an end to confining social structures. There were also many white women who opposed any advance for any women.In this riveting narrative, Dr. Elisabeth Griffith integrates the fight by white and Black women to achieve equality. Previously their parallel struggles for social justice have been presented separately—as white or Black topics—or covered narrowly, through only certain individuals, decades, or incidents. Formidable provides a sweeping, century-long perspective and an expansive cast of change agents. From feminists and civil rights activists to politicians and social justice advocates, from working class women to mothers and homemakers, from radicals and conservatives to those who were offended by feminism, threatened by social change, or convinced of white supremacy, the diversity of the women’s movement mirrors America. After that landmark victory in 1920, suffragists had a sense of optimism, declaring, “Now we can begin!” By 2020, a new generation knew how hard the fight for incremental change was; they would have to begin again. Both engaging and outraging, Formidable will propel listeners to continue their foremothers’ fights to achieve equality for all.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/619039 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State

Author: Russell Cobb

Narrator: Lloyd James

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 40 minutes

Release date: February 21, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Look down as you buzz across America, and Oklahoma looks like another “flyover state.” A closer inspection, however, reveals one of the most tragic, fascinating, and unpredictable places in the United States. Over the span of a century, Oklahoma gave birth to movements for an African American homeland, a vibrant Socialist Party, armed rebellions of radical farmers, and an insurrection by a man called Crazy Snake. In the same era, the state saw numerous oil booms, one of which transformed the small town of Tulsa into the “oil capital of the world.” Add to the chaos one of the nation’s worst episodes of racial violence, a statewide takeover by the Ku Klux Klan, and the rise of a paranoid far-right agenda by a fundamentalist preacher named Billy James Hargis and you have the recipe for America’s most paradoxical state. Far from being a placid place in the heart of “flyover country,” Oklahoma has been a laboratory for all kinds of social, political, and artistic movements, producing a singular list of weirdos, geniuses, and villains. In this book, Russell Cobb tells the story of a state rich in natural resources and artistic talent, yet near the bottom in education and social welfare. Raised in Tulsa, Cobb engages Oklahomans across the boundaries of race and class to hear their troubles, anxieties, and aspirations and delves deep to understand their contradictory and often stridently independent attitudes. Interweaving memoir, social commentary, and sometimes surprising research around the themes of race, religion, and politics, Cobb presents an insightful portrait that will make you rethink everything you thought you knew about the American Heartland.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/616981 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Bloody Verrières: The I. SS-Panzerkorps Defence of the Verrières-Bourguebus Ridges: Volume 2: The Defeat of Operation Spring and the Battles of Tilly-La-Campagne, 23 July – 5 August 1944

Author: Arthur W. Gullachsen

Narrator: Bruce Mann

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

Release date: February 21, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

South of the Norman city of Caen, Verrières Ridge was seen a key stepping-stone for the British Second Army if it was to break out of the Normandy bridgehead in late July 1944. Imposing in height and containing perfect terrain for armored operations, the Germans viewed it as the lynchpin to their defenses south of the city of Caen and east of the Orne river. Following the failure of British Operation Goodwood on 18–20 July and the containment of the Canadian Operation Atlantic, further Allied attacks to seize the ridge would have to defeat arguably the strongest German armored formation in Normandy: The I. SS-Panzerkorps 'Leibstandarte.' The fighting of 23 July–3 August is chronicled in detail, specifically the premier Anglo-Canadian operation to capture Verrières Ridge, Operation Spring on 25 July. Designed as an attack to seize the ridge and exploit south with armor, this battle saw the 2nd Canadian Corps attack savaged again by German armored reserves brought in specifically to defeat another Goodwood. Not satisfied with this defensive victory, German armored forces would then seek to restore an earlier defensive line further north, attacking to destroy the 2nd Canadian Infantry Division. Largely unknown, these were some of the strongest and most successful German armored operations to take place in the Normandy campaign.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/624470 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Africatown: America's Last Slave Ship and the Community It Created

Author: Nick Tabor

Narrator: Chris Butler

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 27 minutes

Release date: February 21, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An epic story, Africatown charts the fraught history of America from those who were brought here as slaves but nevertheless established a home for themselves and their descendants, a community which often thrived despite persistent racism and environmental pollution. In 1860, a ship called the Clotilda was smuggled through the Alabama Gulf Coast, carrying the last group of enslaved people ever brought to the US from West Africa. Five years later, the shipmates were emancipated, but they had no way of getting back home. Instead they created their own community outside the city of Mobile, where they spoke Yoruba and appointed their own leaders, a story chronicled in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon. That community, Africatown, has endured to the present day, and many of the community residents are the shipmates’ direct descendants. After many decades of neglect and a Jim Crow legal system that targeted the area for industrialization, the community is struggling to survive. Many community members believe the pollution from the heavy industry surrounding their homes has caused a cancer epidemic among residents, and companies are eyeing even more land for development. At the same time, after the discovery of the remains of the Clotilda in the riverbed nearby, a renewed effort is underway to create a living memorial to the community and the lives of the slaves who founded it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/612914 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World

Author: Malcolm Harris

Narrator: Patrick Harrison

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 28 hours 20 minutes

Release date: February 14, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 5

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 4

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The history of Silicon Valley, from railroads to microchips, is an “extraordinary” story of disruption and destruction, told for the first time in this comprehensive, jaw-dropping narrative (Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth). Palo Alto’s weather is temperate, its people are educated and enterprising, its corporations are spiritually and materially ambitious and demonstrably world-changing. Palo Alto is also a haunted toxic waste dump built on stolen Indian burial grounds, and an integral part of the capitalist world system. In PALO ALTO, the first comprehensive, global history of Silicon Valley, Malcolm Harris examines how and why Northern California evolved in the particular, consequential way it did, tracing the ideologies, technologies, and policies that have been engineered there over the course of 150 years of Anglo settler colonialism, from IQ tests to the "tragedy of the commons," racial genetics, and "broken windows" theory. The Internet and computers, too. It's a story about how a small American suburb became a powerful engine for economic growth and war, and how it came to lead the world into a surprisingly disastrous 21st century. PALO ALTO is an urgent and visionary history of the way we live now, one that ends with a clear-eyed, radical proposition for how we might begin to change course.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/628895 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: An Assassin in Utopia: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Sex Cult and a President's Murder

Author: Susan Wels

Narrator: Kitty Hendrix

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 12 minutes

Release date: February 7, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

This true crime odyssey explores a forgotten, astonishing chapter of American history, leading the listener from a free-love community in upstate New York to the shocking assassination of President James Garfield. It was heaven on earth—and, some whispered, the devil’s garden. Thousands came by trains and carriages to see this new Eden, carved from hundreds of acres of wild woodland. They marveled at orchards bursting with fruit, thick herds of Ayrshire cattle and Cotswold sheep, and whizzing mills. They gaped at the people who lived in this place—especially the women, with their queer cropped hair and shamelessly short skirts. The men and women of this strange outpost worked and slept together—without sin, they claimed. From 1848 to 1881, a small utopian colony in upstate New York—the Oneida Community—was known for its shocking sexual practices, from open marriage and free love to the sexual training of young boys by older women. And in 1881, a one-time member of the Oneida Community—Charles Julius Guiteau—assassinated President James Garfield in a brutal crime that shook America to its core. An Assassin in Utopia is the first book that weaves together these explosive stories in a tale of utopian experiments, political machinations, and murder. This deeply researched narrative—by bestselling author Susan Wels—tells the true, interlocking stories of the Oneida Community and its radical founder, John Humphrey Noyes; his idol, the eccentric newspaper publisher Horace Greeley, founder of the New Yorker and the New York Tribune; and the gloomy, indecisive President James Garfield—who was assassinated after his first six months in office.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/605391 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: True North Rising: My fifty-year journey with the Inuit and Dene leaders who transformed Canada's North

Author: Whit Fraser

Narrator: Whit Fraser

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 14 minutes

Release date: January 31, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BESTSELLER In this captivating memoir, Whit Fraser weaves scenes from more than fifty years of reporting and living in the North with fascinating portraits of the Dene and Inuit activists who successfully overturned the colonial order and politically reshaped Canada—including his wife, Mary Simon, Canada's first Indigenous governor general. 'This is a huge embrace of a book, irresistible on every level. . . . I couldn't put it down.' —Elizabeth Hay, Scotiabank Giller prize-winning author of Late Nights on Air In True North Rising, Whit Fraser delivers a smart, touching and astute living history of five decades that transformed the North, a span he witnessed first as a longtime CBC reporter and then through his friendships and his work with Dene and Inuit activists and leaders. Whit had a front-row seat at the MacKenzie Valley Pipeline inquiry, the constitutional conferences and the land-claims negotiations that successfully reshaped the North; he's also travelled to every village and town from Labrador to Alaska. His vivid portraits of groundbreakers such as Abe Okpik, Jose Kusugak, Stephen Kakfwi, Marie Wilson, John Amagoalik, Tagak Curley, and his own wife, Mary Simon, bring home their truly historic achievements, but they also give us a privileged glimpse of who they are, and who Whit Fraser is. He may have begun as a know-nothing reporter from the south, but he soon fell in love with the North, and his memoir is a testament to more than fifty years of commitment to its people.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/630039 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America

Author: Margot Canaday

Narrator: Laurel Lefkow

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 48 minutes

Release date: January 31, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

This audiobook narrated by Laurel Lefkow provides a masterful history of the LGBT workforce in America Workplaces have traditionally been viewed as 'straight spaces' in which queer people passed. As a result, historians have directed limited attention to the experiences of queer people on the job. Queer Career rectifies this, offering an expansive historical look at sexual minorities in the modern American workforce. Arguing that queer workers were more visible than hidden and, against the backdrop of state aggression, vulnerable to employer exploitation, Margot Canaday positions employment and fear of job loss as central to gay life in postwar America. Rather than finding that many midcentury employers tried to root out gay employees, Canaday sees an early version of 'don't ask / don't tell': in all kinds of work, as long as queer workers were discreet, they were valued for the lower wages they could be paid, their contingency, their perceived lack of familial ties, and the ease with which they could be pulled in and pushed out of the labor market. Across the socioeconomic spectrum, they were harbingers of post-Fordist employment regimes we now associate with precarity. While progress was not linear, by century's end some gay workers rejected their former discretion, and some employers eventually offered them protection unattained through law. Pushed by activists at the corporate grass roots, business emerged at the forefront of employment rights for sexual minorities. It did so, at least in part, in response to the way that queer workers aligned with, and even prefigured, the labor system of late capitalism. Queer Career shows how LGBT history helps us understand the recent history of capitalism and labor and rewrites our understanding of the queer past.