Audiobooks by John Mack Faragher

California: An American History

A concise and lively history of California, the most multicultural state in the nation "Faragher takes the reader on a captivating journey through myriad twists and turns of California's multicultural history, enlivened by stories of people who rarely penetrate our traditional state chronicles."-Carlos E. Cortés, University of California, Riverside California is the most multicultural state in the nation. As John Mack Faragher argues in this concise and lively history, that is nothing new. California's natural variety has always supported diversity, including Native peoples speaking dozens of distinct languages, Spanish and Mexican colonists, gold seekers from all corners of the globe, and successive migrant waves from the eastern states, Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Islands. Beautifully crafted and elegantly written, Faragher tells the stories of a colorful cast of characters, some famous, others mostly unknown, including African American Archy Lee, who sued for his freedom; Sinkyone Indian woman Sally Bell, who survived genocide; and Jewish schoolgirl Marilyn Greene, who spoke up for her Japanese friends after Pearl Harbor. California's multicultural diversity often led to conflict, turmoil, and violence, but also to invention, improvisation, and a struggle for multicultural democracy.

John Mack Faragher (Author), John Chancer (Narrator)

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A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their Americ

In 1755, New England troops embarked on a 'great and noble scheme' to expel 18,000 French-speaking Acadians ('the neutral French') from Nova Scotia, killing thousands, separating innumerable families, and driving many into forests where they waged a desperate guerrilla resistance. The right of neutrality-to live in peace from the imperial wars waged between France and England-had been one of the founding values of Acadia. Its settlers traded and intermarried freely with native Mikmaq Indians and English Protestants alike. But the Acadians' refusal to swear unconditional allegiance to the British Crown in the mid-eighteenth century gave New Englanders, who had long coveted Nova Scotia's fertile farmland, pretense enough to launch a campaign of ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. John Mack Faragher draws on original research to weave 150 years of history into a gripping narrative of both the civilization of Acadia and the British plot to destroy it.

John Mack Faragher (Author), Paul Heitsch (Narrator)

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Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer

In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America's famous frontier hero while illuminating the American hero-making process itself. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone's own hand, and a treasure trove of reminiscences gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other. "Well written and immensely satisfying in several ways, this biography separates myth from fact while also showing that this is a man about whom legends have been made.... Boone speaks to the American spirit in an elemental way that is wonderfully conveyed by this author, in a book that readers will find memorable."-School Library Journal

John Mack Faragher (Author), Tom Parker (Narrator)

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