Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/464978 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice

Author: Karen L. Cox

Narrator: David Sadzin

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 6 hours 44 minutes

Release date: March 8, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 1 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century—but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and 'heritage' laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/497461 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency

Author: Amie Parnes, Jonathan Allen

Narrator: Rob Shapiro

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 17 hours 30 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.27 of Total 15

Ratings of Narrator: 3.4 of Total 5

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The inside story of the historic 2020 presidential election and Joe Biden’s harrowing ride to victory, from the #1 New York Times bestselling authors of Shattered, the definitive account of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.   Almost no one thought Joe Biden could make it back to the White House—not Donald Trump, not the two dozen Democratic rivals who sought to take down a weak front-runner, not the mega-donors and key endorsers who feared he could not beat Bernie Sanders, not even Barack Obama. The story of Biden’s cathartic victory in the 2020 election is the story of a Democratic Party at odds with itself, torn between the single-minded goal of removing Donald Trump and the push for a bold progressive agenda that threatened to alienate as many voters as it drew.   In Lucky, #1 New York Times bestselling authors Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes use their unparalleled access to key players inside the Democratic and Republican campaigns to unfold how Biden’s nail-biting run for the presidency vexed his own party as much as it did Trump. Having premised his path on unlocking the Black vote in South Carolina, Biden nearly imploded before he got there after a relentless string of misfires left him freefalling in polls and nearly broke.   Allen and Parnes brilliantly detail the remarkable string of chance events that saved him, from the botched Iowa caucus tally that concealed his terrible result, to the pandemic lockdown that kept him off the stump, where he was often at his worst. More powerfully, Lucky unfolds the pitched struggle within Biden’s general election campaign to downplay the very issues that many Democrats believed would drive voters to the polls, especially in the wake of Trump’s response to nationwide protests following the murder of George Floyd. Even Biden’s victory did not salve his party’s wounds; instead, it revealed a surprising, complicated portrait of American voters and crushed Democrats’ belief in the inevitability of a blue wave.   A thrilling masterpiece of political reporting, Lucky is essential reading for understanding the most important election in American history and the future that will come of it.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/493931 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Day the Bubble Burst: A Social History of the Wall Street Crash of 1929

Author: Max Morgan-Witts, Gordon Thomas

Narrator: David Colacci

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 21 hours 34 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The New York Times bestseller that tells the story of an overheated stock market and the financial disaster that led to the Great Depression of the 1930s. A riveting living history about Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929. Captures the era, the intoxicating expectancy, the hope that ruled men's heart and minds before the bubble burst and the black despair of the decade that followed.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/493200 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The American South: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Charles Reagan Wilson

Narrator: Jim Seybert

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 4 hours 47 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The American South is a distinctive place with a dramatic history, and has significance beyond its regional context in the twenty first century. The American South: A Very Short Introduction explores the history of the South as a cultural crossroads, a meeting place between western Europe and West Africa. The South's beginnings illuminate the expansion of Europe into the New World, creating a colonial slave society that distinguished it from other parts of the United States but fostered commonalities with other colonial societies. The Civil War and civil rights movement transformed the South in differing ways and remain a part of a vibrant and contested public memory. More recently, the South's pronounced traditionalism in customs and values was in tension with the forces of modernization that slowly forced change in the twentieth century. Southerners' creative responses to these experiences have made the American South well known around the world in literature, film, music, and cuisine. Charles Reagan Wilson argues for the significance of creativity in the South, emerging from the diversity of peoples, cultures, and experiences that the regional context fostered. The South has now become the new center of immigration, adding to the complexity of the region's cultural, social, economic, and political life.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/489738 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America's Founders

Author: Dennis C. Rasmussen

Narrator: Keith Sellon-Wright

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 16 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 2

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America's constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders' disillusionment. As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders' pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America's political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America's constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/465613 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Thaddeus Stevens: Civil War Revolutionary, Fighter for Racial Justice

Author: Bruce Levine

Narrator: Landon Woodson

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 32 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A “powerful” (The Wall Street Journal) biography of one of the 19th century’s greatest statesmen, encompassing his decades-long fight against slavery and his postwar struggle to bring racial justice to America. Thaddeus Stevens was among the first to see the Civil War as an opportunity for a second American revolution—a chance to remake the country as a genuine multiracial democracy. As one of the foremost abolitionists in Congress in the years leading up to the war, he was a leader of the young Republican Party’s radical wing, fighting for anti-slavery and anti-racist policies long before party colleagues like Abraham Lincoln endorsed them. These policies—including welcoming black men into the Union’s armies—would prove crucial to the Union war effort. During the Reconstruction era that followed, Stevens demanded equal civil and political rights for Black Americans—rights eventually embodied in the 14th and 15th amendments. But while Stevens in many ways pushed his party—and America—towards equality, he also championed ideas too radical for his fellow Congressmen ever to support, such as confiscating large slaveholders’ estates and dividing the land among those who had been enslaved. In Thaddeus Stevens, acclaimed historian Bruce Levine has written a “vital” (The Guardian), “compelling” (James McPherson) biography of one of the most visionary statesmen of the 19th century and a forgotten champion for racial justice in America.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/451850 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher: Monkey's Head, the Pope's Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul

Author: Brandy Schillace

Narrator: Jean Ann Douglass

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 49 minutes

Release date: March 2, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The “delightfully macabre” (The New York Times) true tale of a brilliant and eccentric surgeon…and his quest to transplant the human soul. In the early days of the Cold War, a spirit of desperate scientific rivalry birthed a different kind of space race: not the race to outer space that we all know, but a race to master the inner space of the human body. While surgeons on either side of the Iron Curtain competed to become the first to transplant organs like the kidney and heart, a young American neurosurgeon had an even more ambitious thought: Why not transplant the brain? Dr. Robert White was a friend to two popes and a founder of the Vatican’s Commission on Bioethics. He developed lifesaving neurosurgical techniques still used in hospitals today and was nominated for the Nobel Prize. But like Dr. Jekyll before him, Dr. White had another identity. In his lab, he was waging a battle against the limits of science and against mortality itself—working to perfect a surgery that would allow the soul to live on after the human body had died. This “fascinating” (The Wall Street Journal), “provocative” (The Washington Post) tale follows his decades-long quest into tangled matters of science, Cold War politics, and faith, revealing the complex (and often murky) ethics of experimentation and remarkable innovations that today save patients from certain death. It’s a “masterful” (Science) look at our greatest fears and our greatest hopes—and the long, strange journey from science fiction to science fact.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/486142 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches

Author: S.C. Gwynne

Narrator: David Drummond

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 4 minutes

Release date: February 25, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 5 of Total 5

Ratings of Narrator: 4 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

In the tradition of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a stunningly vivid historical account of the forty-year battle between Comanche Indians and white settlers for control of the American West, centering on Quanah, the greatest Comanche chief of them all. Empire of the Summer Moon spans two astonishing stories. The first traces the rise and fall of the Comanches, the most powerful Indian tribe in American history. The second is the epic saga of the pioneer woman Cynthia Ann Parker and her mixed-blood son Quanah, who became the last and greatest chief of the Comanches. Although readers may be more familiar with the tribal names Apache and Sioux, it was in fact the legendary fighting ability of the Comanches that determined just how and when the American West opened up. Comanche boys became adept bareback riders by age six; full Comanche braves were considered the best horsemen who ever rode. They were so masterful at war and so skillful with their arrows and lances that they stopped the northern drive of colonial Spain from Mexico and halted the French expansion westward from Louisiana. White settlers arriving in Texas from the eastern United States were surprised to find the frontier being rolled backward by Comanches incensed by the invasion of their tribal lands. Against this backdrop Gwynne presents the compelling drama of Cynthia Ann Parker, a nine-year-old girl who was kidnapped by Comanches in 1836. She grew to love her captors and became infamous as the 'White Squaw' who refused to return until her tragic capture by Texas Rangers in 1860. More famous still was her son Quanah, a warrior who was never defeated and whose guerrilla wars in the Texas Panhandle made him a legend. S. C. Gwynne's account of these events is meticulously researched, intellectually provocative, and, above all, thrillingly told.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/493651 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson

Author: Joseph J. Ellis

Narrator: Susan O'malley

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 15 hours 0 minutes

Release date: February 23, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight--and not only during his active political career. After 1809, his longed-for retirement was compromised by a steady stream of guests and tourists who made of his estate at Monticello a virtual hotel, as well as by more than one thousand letters per year, most from strangers, which he insisted on answering personally. In his twilight years Jefferson was already taking on the luster of a national icon, which was polished off by his auspicious death (on July 4, 1896); and in the subsequent seventeen decades of his celebrity--now verging, thanks to virulent revisionists and television documentaries, on notoriety--has been inflated beyond recognition of the original person. For the historian Joseph J. Ellis, the experience of writing about Jefferson was "as if a pathologist, just about to begin an autopsy, has discovered that the body on the operating table was still breathing." In American Sphinx, Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams." For, at the grass roots, Jefferson is no longer liberal or conservative, agrarian or industrialist, pro- or anti-slavery, privileged or populist. He is all things to all people. His own obliviousness to incompatible convictions within himself (which left him deaf to most forms of irony) has leaked out into the world at large--a world determined to idolize him despite his foibles. From Ellis we learn that Jefferson sang incessantly under his breath; that he delivered only two public speeches in eight years as president, while spending ten hours a day at his writing desk; that sometimes his political sensibilities collided with his domestic agenda, as when he ordered an expensive piano from London during a boycott (and pledged to "keep it in storage"). We see him relishing such projects as the nailery at Monticello that allowed him to interact with his slaves more palatably, as pseudo-employer to pseudo-employees. We grow convinced that he preferred to meet his lovers in the rarefied region of his mind rather than in the actual bedchamber. We watch him exhibiting both great depth and great shallowness, combining massive learning with extraordinary naïveté, piercing insights with self-deception on the grandest scale. We understand why we should neither beatify him nor consign him to the rubbish heap of history, though we are by no means required to stop loving him. He is Thomas Jefferson, after all--our very own sphinx.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/489748 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Was America Founded as a Christian Nation? Revised Edition

Author: John Fea

Narrator: Scott R. Pollak

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 11 hours 30 minutes

Release date: February 23, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

John Fea offers a thoroughly researched, evenhanded primer on whether America was founded to be a Christian nation, as many evangelicals assert, or a secular state, as others contend. He approaches the title's question from a historical perspective, helping listeners see past the emotional rhetoric of today to the recorded facts of our past. This updated edition reports on the many issues that have arisen in recent years concerning religion's place in American society including the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage, contraception, and the Affordable Care Act, and state-level restrictions on abortion and demonstrates how they lead us to the question of whether the United States was or is a Christian nation. Fea relates the history of these and other developments, pointing to the underlying questions of national religious identity inherent in each.