Listen to New Full Audiobooks in History, The Americas

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/487101 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Untangling a Red, White, and Black Heritage: A Personal History of the Allotment Era

Author: Darnella Davis

Narrator: Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 8 hours 26 minutes

Release date: June 15, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Examining the legacy of racial mixing in Indian Territory through the land and lives of two families, one of Cherokee Freedman descent and one of Muscogee Creek heritage, Darnella Davis's memoir writes a new chapter in the history of racial mixing on the frontier. It is the only book-length account of the intersections between the three races in Indian Territory and Oklahoma written from the perspective of a tribal person and a freedman. The histories of these families, along with the starkly different federal policies that molded their destinies, offer a powerful corrective to the historical narrative. From the Allotment Period to the present, their claims of racial identity and land in Oklahoma reveal inequalities that still fester more than one hundred years later. Davis offers a provocative opportunity to unpack our current racial discourse and ask ourselves, 'Who are 'we' really?'

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/462982 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter

Author: Kai Bird

Narrator: Arthur Morey

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 27 hours 36 minutes

Release date: June 15, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.86 of Total 7

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

“Important . . . [a] landmark presidential biography . . . Bird is able to build a persuasive case that the Carter presidency deserves this new look.”—The New York Times Book Review An essential re-evaluation of the complex triumphs and tragedies of Jimmy Carter’s presidential legacy—from the expert biographer and Pulitzer Prize–winning co-author of American Prometheus Four decades after Ronald Reagan’s landslide win in 1980, Jimmy Carter’s one-term presidency is often labeled a failure; indeed, many Americans view Carter as the only ex-president to have used the White House as a stepping-stone to greater achievements. But in retrospect the Carter political odyssey is a rich and human story, marked by both formidable accomplishments and painful political adversity. In this deeply researched, brilliantly written account, Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Kai Bird deftly unfolds the Carter saga as a tragic tipping point in American history. As president, Carter was not merely an outsider; he was an outlier. He was the only president in a century to grow up in the heart of the Deep South, and his born-again Christianity made him the most openly religious president in memory. This outlier brought to the White House a rare mix of humility, candor, and unnerving self-confidence that neither Washington nor America was ready to embrace. Decades before today’s public reckoning with the vast gulf between America’s ethos and its actions, Carter looked out on a nation torn by race and demoralized by Watergate and Vietnam and prescribed a radical self-examination from which voters recoiled. The cost of his unshakable belief in doing the right thing would be losing his re-election bid—and witnessing the ascendance of Reagan. In these remarkable pages, Bird traces the arc of Carter’s administration, from his aggressive domestic agenda to his controversial foreign policy record, taking readers inside the Oval Office and through Carter’s battles with both a political establishment and a Washington press corps that proved as adversarial as any foreign power. Bird shows how issues still hotly debated today—from national health care to growing inequality and racism to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—burned at the heart of Carter’s America, and consumed a president who found a moral duty in solving them. Drawing on interviews with Carter and members of his administration and recently declassified documents, Bird delivers a profound, clear-eyed evaluation of a leader whose legacy has been deeply misunderstood. The Outlier is the definitive account of an enigmatic presidency—both as it really happened and as it is remembered in the American consciousness.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/462933 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Battle for the Big Top: P.T. Barnum, James Bailey, John Ringling, and the Death-Defying Saga of the American Circus

Author: Les Standiford

Narrator: B.J. Harrison

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 13 minutes

Release date: June 15, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.33 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

“Les Standiford takes us under the big top and behind the curtain in this richly researched and thoroughly engaging narrative that captures all of the entrepreneurial intrigue and spirit of the American circus.” —Gilbert King, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Devil in the Grove Millions have sat under the “big top,” watching as trapeze artists glide and clowns entertain, but few know the captivating stories behind the men whose creativity, ingenuity, and determination created one of our country’s most beloved pastimes. In Battle for the Big Top, New York Times–bestselling author Les Standiford brings to life a remarkable era when three circus kings—James Bailey, P. T. Barnum, and John Ringling—all vied for control of the vastly profitable and influential American Circus. Ultimately, the rivalry of these three men resulted in the creation of an institution that would surpass all intentions and, for 147 years, hold a nation spellbound.   Filled with details of their ever-evolving showmanship, business acumen, and personal magnetism, this Ragtime-like narrative will delight and enchant circus-lovers and anyone fascinated by the American experience.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/499287 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

Author: Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Narrator: Machelle Williams

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

Release date: June 8, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450%. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called 'the biggest prison building project in the history of the world.' Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces conjoined to produce the prison boom. Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California's economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth. The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the 'three strikes' law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world. Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state's commitment to prison expansion.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/465616 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Great Dissenter: The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero

Author: Peter S. Canellos

Narrator: Arthur Morey

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 19 hours 23 minutes

Release date: June 8, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4 of Total 1

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 1

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible”—and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a “magnificent” (Douglas Brinkley) and “thoroughly researched” (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system’s most significant failures and most inspiring successes.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/463594 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth

Author: Jason Stanford, Chris Tomlinson, Bryan Burrough

Narrator: Fred Sanders

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 15 minutes

Release date: June 8, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.43 of Total 14

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 5

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A New York Times bestseller! “Lively and absorbing. . .' — The New York Times Book Review 'Engrossing.' —Wall Street Journal “Entertaining and well-researched . . . ” —Houston Chronicle Three noted Texan writers combine forces to tell the real story of the Alamo, dispelling the myths, exploring why they had their day for so long, and explaining why the ugly fight about its meaning is now coming to a head. Every nation needs its creation myth, and since Texas was a nation before it was a state, it's no surprise that its myths bite deep. There's no piece of history more important to Texans than the Battle of the Alamo, when Davy Crockett and a band of rebels went down in a blaze of glory fighting for independence from Mexico, losing the battle but setting Texas up to win the war. However, that version of events, as Forget the Alamo definitively shows, owes more to fantasy than reality. Just as the site of the Alamo was left in ruins for decades, its story was forgotten and twisted over time, with the contributions of Tejanos--Texans of Mexican origin, who fought alongside the Anglo rebels--scrubbed from the record, and the origin of the conflict over Mexico's push to abolish slavery papered over. Forget the Alamo provocatively explains the true story of the battle against the backdrop of Texas's struggle for independence, then shows how the sausage of myth got made in the Jim Crow South of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As uncomfortable as it may be to hear for some, celebrating the Alamo has long had an echo of celebrating whiteness. In the past forty-some years, waves of revisionists have come at this topic, and at times have made real progress toward a more nuanced and inclusive story that doesn't alienate anyone. But we are not living in one of those times; the fight over the Alamo's meaning has become more pitched than ever in the past few years, even violent, as Texas's future begins to look more and more different from its past. It's the perfect time for a wise and generous-spirited book that shines the bright light of the truth into a place that's gotten awfully dark.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/451455 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

Author: Tiya Miles

Narrator: Janina Edwards

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 29 minutes

Release date: June 8, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 4.55 of Total 11

Ratings of Narrator: 5 of Total 3

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.   WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize, PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, Lawrence W. Levine Award, Darlene Clark Hine Award, Cundill History Prize, Joan Kelly Memorial Prize, Massachusetts Book Award ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, Slate, Vulture, Publishers Weekly “A history told with brilliance and tenderness and fearlessness.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States   In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language.    Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States. All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and love passed down against steep odds. It honors the creativity and resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.   FINALIST: MAAH Stone Book Award, Kirkus Prize, Mark Lynton History Prize, Chatauqua Prize, Women’s Prize ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times, NPR, Time, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian Magazine, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Ms. magazine, Book Riot, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, Booklist

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/499525 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: A Night at the Sweet Gum Head: Drag, Drugs, Disco, and Atlanta's Gay Revolution

Author: Martin Padgett

Narrator: Martin Padgett

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

An electric and intimate story of 1970s gay Atlanta through its bedazzling drag clubs and burgeoning rights activism. Coursing with a pumped-up beat, gay Atlanta was the South's mecca—a beacon for gays and lesbians growing up in its homophobic towns and cities. There, the Sweet Gum Head was the club for achieving drag stardom. Martin Padgett evokes the fantabulous disco decade by going deep into the lives of two men who shaped and were shaped by this city: John Greenwell, an Alabama runaway who found himself and his avocation performing as the exquisite Rachel Wells; and Bill Smith, who took to the streets and city hall to change antigay laws. Against this optimism for visibility and rights, gay people lived with daily police harassment and drug dealing and murder in their discos and drag clubs. Conducting interviews with many of the major figures and reading through deteriorating gay archives, Padgett expertly re-creates Atlanta from a time when a vibrant, new queer culture of drag and pride came into being.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/493256 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: This Country: My Life in Politics and History

Author: Chris Matthews

Narrator: Chris Matthews

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 9 hours 10 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Ratings: Ratings of Book: 3.25 of Total 4

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

A “quintessentially American” (Policy Magazine) memoir of politics and history from Chris Matthews, New York Times bestselling author and long-time host of MSNBC’s Hardball with Chris Matthews. In This Country, Chris Matthews “has written a love letter to his country” (Joy Reid, host of The ReidOut and author of The Man Who Sold America), offering a panoramic portrait of post-World War II America through the story of his remarkable life and career. It is a story of risk and adventure, of self-reliance and service, of loyalty and friendship. It is a story driven by an abiding faith in our country. Raised in a large Irish-Catholic family in Philadelphia at a time when kids hid under their desks in atomic war drills, Chris’s life etched a pattern: take a leap, live an adventure, then learn what it means. As a young Peace Corps graduate, Chris moved to DC and began knocking on doors on Capitol Hill. With dreams of becoming what Ted Sorensen had been for Jack Kennedy, Chris landed as a staffer to Utah Senator Frank Moss, where his eyes were opened to the game of big-league politics. In the 1970s, Matthews mounted a campaign for Congress as a Democratic maverick running against Philadelphia’s old political machine. He didn’t win the most votes, but his grit put him on the path to a top job in the White House. As a speechwriter for President Carter, Matthews witnessed the triumphs and tragedies of that administration; from the diplomatic brilliance of the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty to the disaster of the Iran hostage crisis. After Carter’s defeat, Chris became chief of staff to legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, a perch that gave him an on-the-job PhD in American politics during the Reagan years. Chris than leapt to the other side of the political matrix as a columnist and reporter. For the San Francisco Examiner, he covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first all-races election in South Africa, the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, and every American presidency from Reagan to George W. Bush. Chris would go on to pioneer cable news with a fast-paced, no-nonsense television program. His show, Hardball with Chris Matthews, would become a political institution for twenty years. As Chris charts his political odyssey, he paints an animated picture of a nation searching for its soul. He reflects with grace and wisdom, showcasing the grand arc of the American story through one life dedicated to its politics.

Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/1/audiobook/488563 to listen full audiobooks.

Title: The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity

Author: Jill Lepore

Narrator: Bernadette Dunne

Format: Unabridged Audiobook

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Release date: June 1, 2021

Genres: The Americas

Publisher's Summary:

Winner of the the 1998 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of the Phi Beta Kappa Society King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war--colonists against Indians--that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war." It all began when Philip (called Metacom by his own people), the leader of the Wampanoag Indians, led attacks against English towns in the colony of Plymouth. The war spread quickly, pitting a loose confederation of southeastern Algonquians against a coalition of English colonists. While it raged, colonial armies pursued enemy Indians through the swamps and woods of New England, and Indians attacked English farms and towns from Narragansett Bay to the Connecticut River Valley. Both sides, in fact, had pursued the war seemingly without restraint, killing women and children, torturing captives, and mutilating the dead. The fighting ended after Philip was shot, quartered, and beheaded in August 1676. The war's brutality compelled the colonists to defend themselves against accusations that they had become savages. But Jill Lepore makes clear that it was after the war--and because of it--that the boundaries between cultures, hitherto blurred, turned into rigid ones. King Philip's War became one of the most written-about wars in our history, and Lepore argues that the words strengthened and hardened feelings that, in turn, strengthened and hardened the enmity between Indians and Anglos. She shows how, as late as the nineteenth century, memories of the war were instrumental in justifying Indian removals--and how in our own century that same war has inspired Indian attempts to preserve "Indianness" as fiercely as the early settlers once struggled to preserve their Englishness. Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.