Get Your Favorite Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/626390 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The White House Plumbers: The Seven Weeks that Led to Watergate and Doomed Nixon's Presidency

Author: Egil 'bud' Krogh, Matthew Krogh

Narrator: Peter Krogh

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 4 hours 6 minutes

Release date: January 26, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

SOON TO BE A FIVE-PART HBO SERIES, STARRING WOODY HARRELSON AND JUSTIN THEROUX The true story of the White House Plumbers, a secret unit inside Nixon's White House, their ill-conceived plans to stop the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, and how they led to Watergate and the President's demise. On July 17, 1971, Egil “Bud” Krogh was summoned to a closed-door meeting by his mentor – and a key confidant of the president – John Ehrlichman. Expecting to discuss the most recent drug control program launched in Vietnam, Krogh was shocked when Ehrlichman handed him a file and the responsibility for the Special Investigations Unit, or SIU, later to be notoriously known as “The Plumbers.” The Plumbers' work, according to Nixon, was critical to national security: they were to investigate the leaks of top secret government documents, including the Pentagon Papers, to the press. Driven by blind loyalty, diligence, and dedication, Krogh, along with his co-director, David Young, set out to handle the job, eventually hiring G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, who would lead the break-in to the office of Dr. Fielding, a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg, the man they suspected was doing the leaking. Krogh had no idea that his decisions would soon lead to one of the most famous conspiracies in presidential history and the demise of the Nixon administration. The White House Plumbers is Krogh's account of what really happened behind the closed doors of the Nixon White House, how a good man can make bad decisions, and the redemptive power of integrity. Including the story of how Krogh served time and later rebuilt his life, The White House Plumbers is gripping, thoughtful, and a cautionary tale of placing loyalty over principle.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/620068 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: On Becoming an American Writer: Essays and Nonfiction

Author: James Alan Mcpherson

Narrator: Cary Hite

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 19 minutes

Release date: January 17, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Discover the unique mind and humane vision of an under-recognized American author. Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves. These essays range from McPherson’s profile of comedian Richard Pryor on the cusp of his stardom; a moving tribute to his mentor, Ralph Ellison; a near-fatal battle with viral meningitis; and the story of how McPherson became a reluctant landlord to an elderly Black woman and her family. There are meditations on family as the author travels to Disneyland with his daughter, on the nuances of a neighborhood debate about naming a street after Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King, and, throughout, those connections that make us most deeply human—including connections between writer and listener. This collection is for anyone seeking a better understanding of our world and a connection to a wise and wickedly funny writer who speaks with forceful relevance and clarity across the decades.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/622779 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Hella Town: Oakland’s History of Development and Disruption

Author: Mitchell Schwarzer

Narrator: Tom Beyer

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 38 minutes

Release date: January 17, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Hella Town reveals the profound impact of transportation improvements, systemic racism, and regional competition on Oakland's built environment. Often overshadowed by San Francisco, its larger and more glamorous twin, Oakland has a fascinating history of its own. From serving as a major transportation hub to forging a dynamic manufacturing sector, by the mid-twentieth century Oakland had become the urban center of the East Bay. Hella Town focuses on how political deals, economic schemes, and technological innovations fueled this emergence but also seeded the city's postwar struggles. Toward the turn of the millennium, as immigration from Latin America and East Asia increased, Oakland became one of the most diverse cities in the country. The city still grapples with the consequences of uneven class- and race-based development-amid-disruption. How do past decisions about where to locate highways or public transit, urban renewal districts or civic venues, parks or shopping centers, influence how Oaklanders live today? A history of Oakland's buildings and landscapes, its booms and its busts, provides insight into its current conditions: an influx of new residents and businesses, skyrocketing housing costs, and a lingering chasm between the haves and have-nots.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/618510 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: My Soul Is a Witness: The Traumatic Afterlife of Lynching

Author: Mari N. Crabtree

Narrator: Allyson Johnson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 23 minutes

Release date: January 10, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An intimate look at the afterlife of lynching through the personal stories of Black victims and survivors who lived through and beyond its trauma Mari N. Crabtree traces the long afterlife of lynching in the South through the traumatic memories it left in its wake. African American victims and survivors had to find a way to live through and beyond the horrors of lynching. Crabtree offers a theory of African American collective trauma and memory rooted in a strategy for “working through” trauma that has long existed within the African American cultural tradition: the ironic spirit of the blues sensibility—a spirit of misdirection and cunning that blends joy and pain. Black southerners often shielded their loved ones from the most painful memories of local lynchings with strategic silences but also told lynching stories about vengeful ghosts or a wrathful God or the deathbed confessions of a lyncher tormented by his past They protested lynching and its legacies through art and activism, and they mourned those lost to a mob’s fury. They infused a blues element into their lynching narratives to confront traumatic memories and keep the blues at bay, even if just for a spell. Telling their stories troubles the simplistic binary of resistance or submission that has tended to dominate narratives of Black life and reminds us that amid the utter devastation of lynching were glimmers of hope and an affirmation of life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/613910 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Nation So Conceived: Abraham Lincoln and the Paradox of Democratic Sovereignty

Author: Michael P. Zuckert

Narrator: David Colacci

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 54 minutes

Release date: December 27, 2022

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The culmination of years of work on Abraham Lincoln's political thought, Michael Zuckert's A Nation So Conceived argues for a coherent center to Lincoln's political ideology. Zuckert provides invaluable guidance to understanding both Lincoln and the politics of the United States between 1845 and Lincoln's death in 1865 by focusing on roughly a dozen speeches that Lincoln made during his career. This listener-friendly chronological organization is motivated by Zuckert's emphasis on Lincoln as a practical politician who was always fully aware of the political context of the moment. According to Lincoln's speech at Gettysburg, America was new precisely because it was born in dedication to the first premise of the theory of democratic sovereignty: that all men are created equal. Lincoln's thought consisted in an ever-deepening meditation on the grounds and implications of that proposition, both in its constructive and in its destructive potential. A Nation So Conceived is devoted to exploring the paradoxical duality of 'created equal.' In a nearly comprehensive study of Lincoln's thought, Zuckert uses lessons he learned from decades of teaching to reveal how Lincoln understood both its truth and its pathological consequences while offering an assessment of his aims and achievements as a statesman.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/625844 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Stormy Passage: Mexico from Colony to Republic, 1750–1850

Author: Eric Van Young

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 7 minutes

Release date: December 27, 2022

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In this engaging book, Eric Van Young traces the political, economic, and social development of Mexico through the crucial one hundred years of its remarkable transition from a relatively prosperous Spanish colony to a violently unstable republic marked by economic stagnation, political confrontation, and burgeoning efforts at modernization. Featuring primary sources from figures of the period, Van Young discusses the political instability of the period—internal warfare, military uprisings, intermittent dictatorships, sharp conflicts among political groupings—and attributes them to a belief by political actors in the fundamental lack of legitimacy in central government institutions after the sweeping away of the Bourbon imperial structure and its replacement first with a very short-lived Mexican empire followed by a series of increasingly authoritarian aspirational republican constitutions.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/622862 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Heart of Hell: The Soldiers' Struggle for Spotsylvania's Bloody Angle

Author: Jeffry D. Wert

Narrator: Al Kessel

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 57 minutes

Release date: December 27, 2022

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The struggle over the fortified Confederate position known as Spotsylvania's Mule Shoe was without parallel during the Civil War. A Union assault that began at 4:30 A.M. on May 12, 1864, sparked brutal combat that lasted nearly twenty-four hours. By the time Grant's forces withdrew, some 55,000 men from Union and Confederate armies had been drawn into the fury, battling in torrential rain along the fieldworks at distances often less than the length of a rifle barrel. One Union private recalled the fighting as a 'seething, bubbling, soaring hell of hate and murder.' By the time Lee's troops established a new fortified line in the predawn hours of May 13, some 17,500 officers and men from both sides had been killed, wounded, or captured when the fighting ceased. The site of the most intense clashes became forever known as the Bloody Angle. Here, renowned military historian Jeffry D. Wert draws on the personal narratives of Union and Confederate troops who survived the fight to offer a gripping story of Civil War combat at its most difficult. Wert's harrowing tale reminds us that the war's story, often told through its commanders and campaigns, truly belonged to the common soldier.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/625924 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawai'i

Author: Tom Coffman

Narrator: Kaipo Schwab

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 26 minutes

Release date: December 20, 2022

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In 1893 a small group of white planters and missionary descendants backed by the United States overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai'i and established a government modeled on the Jim Crow South. In Nation Within Tom Coffman tells the complex history of the unsuccessful efforts of deposed Hawaiian queen Lili'uokalani and her subjects to resist annexation, which eventually came in 1898. Coffman describes native Hawaiian political activism, the queen's visits to Washington, D.C., to lobby for independence, and her imprisonment, along with hundreds of others, after their aborted armed insurrection. Exposing the myths that fueled the narrative that native Hawaiians willingly relinquished their nation, Coffman shows how Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt conspired to extinguish Hawai'i's sovereignty in the service of expanding the United States' growing empire.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/629547 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Wizards: David Duke, America's Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right

Author: Brian Fairbanks

Narrator: Chris Sorensen

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Release date: December 13, 2022

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The '91 Louisiana Governor's race was supposed to be forgettable. But when former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke shocked the nation by ousting incumbent Republican Governor Buddy Roemer in the primary, the world took notice. Democrat Edwin Edwards, a former three-term governor and two-time corruption defendant, was left alone to face Duke in the general election—and he was going to lose. Then a little-known state committeewoman stepped in with evidence of Duke's nefarious past. Could her evidence be enough to sway the minds of fired-up voters, or would Louisiana welcome a far-right radical into the highest office in the state? Journalist Brian Fairbanks explores how the final showdown between Duke and Edwards in November 1991 led to a major shift in our national politics, as well as the rise of the radical right and white supremacist groups, and how history repeated itself in the 2016 presidential election. The story of these political 'wizards,' almost forgotten by history, remains eerily prescient and disturbingly relevant.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/629203 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty

Author: Andrew Meier

Narrator: Mark Deakins

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 38 hours 44 minutes

Release date: December 13, 2022

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An “epic and intimate” (David M. Kennedy) portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence extending from daily life in New York City to the shaping of the American Century “Magisterial . . . a vivid retelling of critical domestic and world events over two centuries.”—Dr. Fiona Hill After coming to America from Germany in 1866, the Morgenthaus made history in international diplomacy, in domestic politics, and in America’s criminal justice system. With unprecedented, exclusive access to family archives, award-winning journalist and biographer Andrew Meier vividly chronicles how the Morgenthaus amassed a fortune in Manhattan real estate, advised presidents, advanced the New Deal, exposed the Armenian genocide, rescued victims of the Holocaust, waged war in the Mediterranean and Pacific, and, from a foundation of private wealth, built a dynasty of public service. In the words of former mayor Ed Koch, they were “the closest we’ve got to royalty in New York City.”  Lazarus Morgenthau arrived in America dreaming of rebuilding the fortune he had lost in his homeland. He ultimately died destitute, but the family would rise again with the ascendance of Henry, who became a wealthy and powerful real estate baron. From there, the Morgenthaus went on to influence the most consequential presidency of the twentieth century, as Henry’s son Henry Jr. became FDR’s longest-serving aide, his Treasury secretary during the war, and his confidant of thirty years. Finally, there was Robert Morgenthau, a decorated World War II hero who would become the longest-tenured district attorney in the history of New York City. Known as the “DA for life,” he oversaw the most consequential and controversial prosecutions in New York of the last fifty years, from the war on the Mafia to the infamous Central Park Jogger case.  The saga of the Morgenthaus has lain half hidden in the shadows for too long. At heart a family history, Morgenthau is also an American epic, as sprawling and surprising as the country itself.  * This audiobook edition includes a downloadable PDF that contains images from the book.