Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/639061 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street

Author: Victor Luckerson

Narrator: Jd Jackson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 10 minutes

Release date: May 23, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A multigenerational saga of a family and a community in Tulsa’s Greenwood district, known as “Black Wall Street,” that in one century survived the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, urban renewal, and gentrification “Ambitious . . . absorbing . . . By the end of Luckerson’s outstanding book, the idea of building something new from the ashes of what has been destroyed becomes comprehensible, even hopeful.”—Marcia Chatelain, The New York Times WINNER: The Dayton Literary Peace Prize; The MAAH Stone Book Award; The SABEW Best in Business Book Award; The Lillian Smith Book Award; The Oklahoma Historical Society’s E. E. Dale Award FINALIST: The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR When Ed Goodwin moved with his parents to the Greenwood neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his family joined a community soon to become the center of black life in the West. But just a few years later, on May 31, 1921, the teenaged Ed hid in a bathtub as a white mob descended on his neighborhood, laying waste to thirty-five blocks and murdering as many as three hundred people in one of the worst acts of racist violence in U.S. history. The Goodwins and their neighbors soon rebuilt the district into “a Mecca,” in Ed’s words, where nightlife thrived and small businesses flourished. Ed bought a newspaper to chronicle Greenwood’s resurgence and battles against white bigotry, and his son Jim, an attorney, embodied the family’s hopes for the civil rights movement. But by the 1970s urban renewal policies had nearly emptied the neighborhood. Today the newspaper remains, and Ed’s granddaughter Regina represents the neighborhood in the Oklahoma state legislature, working alongside a new generation of local activists to revive it once again.  In Built from the Fire, journalist Victor Luckerson tells the true story behind a potent national symbol of success and solidarity and weaves an epic tale about a neighborhood that refused, more than once, to be erased.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631082 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: V Is For Victory

Author: Craig Nelson

Narrator: Stephen Graybill

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 0 minutes

Release date: May 23, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF 2023 “Belongs in the library alongside the histories and biographies of Martin Gilbert, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and David McCullough.” —Doug Stanton, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Horse Soldiers In this epic and definitive history of the American home front during World War II, New York Times bestselling historian Craig Nelson reveals how FDR won the support of a nation antagonistic to war in Europe and pushed both government and industry to build “the arsenal of democracy”—the secret weapon that won the war. In 1938, the United States was so politically isolationist and pacifist that its defense forces were smaller than Portugal’s. That same year, Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the federal government to spark a dramatic expansion in domestic airplane production, and this minor effort—three years before the attack on Pearl Harbor—would in time become what Roosevelt called “the arsenal of democracy,” the full-throttle unleashing of American enterprise and ingenuity that was the secret weapon for victory in World War II. Signaled by Roosevelt’s public fight with Lindbergh—known as the Great Debate—victory at land, sea, and air across the globe began at home. In this “richly detailed, highly readable account of presidential leadership in perilous times” (New York Journal of Books), Craig Nelson traces how under FDR, the United States rose from poverty and solitude to defeat the greatest evils of the 20th century. By transforming what Americans thought they could achieve, FDR’s efforts ended the Great Depression; conquered the fascists of Germany, Italy, and Japan; birthed America’s middle-class affluence and consumer society; led to jet engines, computers, radar, the military-industrial complex, Big Science, and nuclear weapons; triggered a global economic boom; and turned the U.S. military into a worldwide titan—with America the undisputed leader of world affairs. While the arsenal of democracy has come to mean this miracle of American industry, when Roosevelt said it, he meant the miracle of the American people. Revealing an era when Detroit was Silicon Valley; Ford was Apple; and Sears, Roebuck was Amazon, while filled with reflections on our own time, V Is for Victory draws on five years of research to create a powerful and essential narrative largely overlooked in conventional histories of the war but which, in Nelson’s skilled, authoritative hands, becomes an illuminating and important work destined to become an American history classic.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/631045 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Book of Charlie

Author: David Von Drehle

Narrator: David Von Drehle

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 0 minutes

Release date: May 23, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.83 of Total 69

Ratings of Narrator: 4.21 of Total 14

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

One of our nation’s most prominent writers discovers the truth about how to live a long and happy life from the centenarian next door in this “original and highly readable account of a splendid American life” (The Wall Street Journal). When a veteran Washington journalist moved to Kansas, he met a new neighbor who was more than a century old. Little did he know that he was beginning a long friendship—and a profound lesson in the meaning of life. Charlie White was no ordinary neighbor. Born before radio, Charlie lived long enough to use a smartphone. When a shocking tragedy interrupted his idyllic boyhood, Charlie mastered survival strategies that reflect thousands of years of human wisdom. Thus armored, Charlie’s sense of adventure carried him on an epic journey of the Jazz Age, racing aboard ambulances through Depression-era gangster wars, improvising techniques for early open-heart surgery, and cruising the Amazon as a guest of Peru’s president. David Von Drehle came to understand that Charlie’s resilience and willingness to grow made this remarkable neighbor a master in the art of thriving through times of dramatic change. As a gift to his children, he set out to tell Charlie’s secrets. The Book of Charlie is a “genuinely original, formula-shattering” (Bob Woodward) gospel of grit—the inspiring story of one man’s journey through a century of upheaval. The history that unfolds through Charlie’s story reminds you that the United States has always been a divided nation, a questing nation—a nation of Charlies in the rollercoaster pursuit of a good and meaningful life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669784 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

Author: Mariame Kaba, Kelly Hayes

Narrator: Diana Blue

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 42 minutes

Release date: May 16, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe. Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the political lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic, including the convergence of mass protest and mass formations of mutual aid, and consider what this confluence of power can teach us about a future that will require mass acts of care, rescue, and defense, in the face of both state violence and environmental disaster. The book is intended to aid and empower activists and organizers as they attempt to map their own journeys through the work of justice-making. It includes insights from a spectrum of experienced organizers, including Sharon Lungo, Carlos Saavedra, Ejeris Dixon, Barbara Ransby, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore about some of the difficult and joyous lessons they have learned in their work.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669750 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Vanishing Point: The Search for a B-24 Bomber Crew Lost on the World War II Home Front

Author: Tom Wilber

Narrator: Lee Goettl

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Release date: May 15, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

At the height of World War II, a B-24 Liberator bomber vanished with its crew while on a training mission over upstate New York. The final hours and ultimate resting place of pilot Keith Ponder and seven other US aviators aboard the plane remain mysteries to this day. The tale is at once a compelling instance of loss on the World War II American home front and a more extensive, largely unreported history. Ponder—a twenty-one-year-old from rural Mississippi—and his crew were tragically unexceptional casualties in the monumental effort to recruit and train an air force en masse to counter the global conquest of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. More than fifteen thousand American airmen and, in some cases, women burned, crashed, or fell to their deaths in stateside training accidents during the war—their lives and stories shuffled away in piles of Air Force bureaucracy. The forgotten story of Getaway Gertie was originally inspired by summer evenings around the campfire on the shores of Lake Ontario, where parts of the plane have washed up. Building on those campfire tales, Wilber deftly connects myth with fact and memory with historicity. The result is a vivid portrait of the forgotten soldier of the home front and a new take on the meaning of wartime sacrifice as the last survivors of the Greatest Generation pass away.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/672079 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Last Honest Man: The CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the Kennedys—and One Senator's Fight to Save Democracy

Author: James Risen

Narrator: Kevin Stillwell

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 5 minutes

Release date: May 9, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.67 of Total 3

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In this “gripping . . . spectacular piece of reporting” (Ken Burns), a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines Senator Frank Church, the man at the center of numerous investigations into the abuses of power within the American government. ​   For decades now, America’s national security state has grown ever bigger, ever more secretive and powerful, and ever more abusive. Only once did someone manage to put a stop to any of it. Senator Frank Church of Idaho was an unlikely hero. He led congressional opposition to the Vietnam War and had become a scathing, radical critic of what he saw as American imperialism around the world. But he was still politically ambitious, privately yearning for acceptance from the foreign policy establishment that he hated and eager to run for president. Despite his flaws, Church would show historic strength in his greatest moment, when in the wake of Watergate he was suddenly tasked with investigating abuses of power in the intelligence community. The dark truths that Church exposed—from assassination plots by the CIA, to links between the Kennedy dynasty and the mafia, to the surveillance of civil rights activists by the NSA and FBI—would shake the nation to its core, and forever change the way that Americans thought about not only their government but also their ability to hold it accountable. Drawing upon hundreds of interviews, thousands of pages of recently declassified documents, and reams of unpublished letters, notes, and memoirs, some of which remain sensitive today, Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter James Risen tells the gripping, untold story of truth and integrity standing against unchecked power—and winning—in The Last Honest Man. An instant New York Times bestseller

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/668826 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Communists in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s

Author: Bettina Aptheker

Narrator: Ann Sprinkle

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 13 hours 33 minutes

Release date: May 9, 2023

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 4.5 of Total 2

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The Communist Party banned lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from membership beginning in 1938 when it cast them off as 'degenerates.' It persisted in this policy until 1991. During this sixty-year ban, gays and lesbians who did join the Communist Party were deeply closeted within it, as well as in their public lives as both queer and Communist. By the late 1930s, the Communist Party had a membership approaching 100,000 and tens of thousands more people moved in its orbit through the Popular Front against fascism, anti-racist organizing, especially in the south, and its widely read cultural magazine, the New Masses. Based on a decade of archival research, correspondence, and interviews, Bettina Aptheker explores this history, also pulling from her own experience as a closeted lesbian in the Communist Party in the 1960s and '70s. Ironically, and in spite of this homophobia, individual Communists laid some of the political and theoretical foundations for lesbian and gay liberation and women's liberation, and contributed significantly to peace, social justice, civil rights, and Black and Latinx liberation movements. This book will be of interest to students, scholars, and anyone interested in political history, gender studies, and the history of sexuality.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/657298 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Finding Judge Crater: A Life and Phenomenal Disappearance in Jazz Age New York

Author: Stephen J. Riegel

Narrator: Chris Monteiro

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Release date: May 9, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

On the night of August 6, 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a newly appointed judge and prominent figure in many circles of Manhattan, hailed a taxi in the heart of Broadway and vanished into thin air. Despite a decades-long international manhunt led by the New York Police Department's esteemed Missing Persons Bureau, the reason for Crater's disappearance remains a confounding mystery. In the early months of the investigation, evidence implicated and imperiled New York's top officials, including then-Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mayor Jimmy Walker, as well as the city's Tammany Hall political machine, lawyers and judges, and a theater mogul. Drawing on new sources, including NYPD case files and court records, and overlooked evidence discovered years later, Riegel pieces together the puzzle of what likely happened to Joseph Crater and why. To uncover the mystery, he delves into Crater's ascension into the scintillating and corrupt world of Manhattan in the Roaring Twenties and Jazz Age. In turn, the story of the judge's vanishing amid the Great Depression unfolds as a harbinger of the disappearance of his lost metropolis and its transformation into modern-day New York City.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669781 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Slow, Calculated Lynching: The Story of Clyde Kennard

Author: Devery S. Anderson

Narrator: James Fouhey

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 49 minutes

Release date: April 25, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, countless Black citizens endured violent resistance and even death while fighting for their constitutional rights. One of those citizens, Clyde Kennard, a Korean War veteran and civil rights leader from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, attempted repeatedly to enroll at the all-white Mississippi Southern College in the late 1950s. In A Slow, Calculated Lynching, Devery S. Anderson tells the story of a man who paid the ultimate price for trying to attend a white college during Jim Crow. Anderson examines the relentless subterfuge against Kennard, including the cruelly successful attempts to frame him—once for a misdemeanor and then for a felony. This second conviction resulted in a sentence at Mississippi State Penitentiary, forever disqualifying him from attending a state-sponsored school. While imprisoned, he developed cancer, was denied care, then sadly died six months after the governor commuted his sentence. In this prolonged lynching, Clyde Kennard was robbed of his ambitions and ultimately his life, but his final days and legacy reject the notion that he was powerless. Anderson highlights the resolve of friends and fellow activists to posthumously restore his name. He was gone, but countless others still benefit from Kennard's legacy and the biracial, bipartisan effort he inspired.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/669770 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Grant at 200: Reconsidering the Life and Legacy of Ulysses S. Grant

Author: Frank J. Scaturro, Chris Mackowski Phd

Narrator: Rick Adamson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 16 minutes

Release date: April 25, 2023

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Ulysses S. Grant stood at the center of the American Civil War maelstrom. The Ohio native answered his nation's call to service and finished the war as a lieutenant general in command of the United States Army. Four years later, he ascended to the presidency to better secure the peace he had helped win on the battlefield. Despite his major achievements in war and peace, political and sectional enemies battered his reputation. For nearly a century, his military and political career remained deeply misunderstood. Since the Civil War centennial, however, Grant's reputation has blossomed into a full renaissance. His military record garners new respect and, more recently, an appreciation for his political career—particularly his strong advocacy for equal rights—is quickly catching up. Throughout these decades, his personal memoirs marking him as a significant American 'Man of Letters' have never gone out of print. Grant at 200: Reconsidering the Life and Legacy of Ulysses S. Grant celebrates the bicentennial of the birth of a man whose towering impact on American history has often been overshadowed and, in many cases, ignored. This collection of essays by some of today's leading Grant scholars offers fresh perspectives on Grant's military career and presidency, as well as underexplored personal topics such as his faith and family life.