History Audiobooks | LoveReading

Almost a decade ago, author and educator William J. Bennett and John T. E. Cribb published a 365-day almanac of our nation's history. Now, in this new two-volume series compiled from The American Patriot's Almanac, Bennett and Cribb's masterful grasp of our history offers 150 examples of fascinating details of great Americans. A two-volume series compiled from William J. Bennett's bestselling book, revised and updated. 150 Great Americans includes: - American drama and interesting facts about important American figures - Obscure details about American history - Patriotic facts to broaden one's sense of the past - Bold personalities and internal conflicts - Discoveries, ideas, and more In these easy-to-read entries, historical Americans reemerge not as marble icons or dust-dry names in a textbook, but as full-blooded, heroic pioneers whose far-reaching vision forged our nation. Great for history buffs, homeschoolers, teachers, and people who are interested in American history.

John T.E. Cribb, William J. Bennett (Author), Milton Bagby (Narrator)

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1517: Martin Luther and the Invention of the Reformation

Martin Luther's posting of the 95 Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517 is one of the most famous events of Western history. It inaugurated the Protestant Reformation, and has for centuries been a powerful and enduring symbol of religious freedom of conscience, and of righteous protest against the abuse of power. But did it actually really happen? In this engagingly-written, wide-ranging and insightful work of cultural history, leading Reformation historian Peter Marshall reviews the available evidence, and concludes that, very probably, it did not. The theses-posting is a myth. And yet, Marshall argues, this fact makes the incident all the more historically significant. In tracing how-and why-a "non-event" ended up becoming a defining episode of the modern historical imagination. Marshall compellingly explores the multiple ways in which the figure of Martin Luther, and the nature of the Reformation itself, have been remembered and used for their own purposes by subsequent generations of Protestants and others-in Germany, Britain, the United States and elsewhere. As people in Europe, and across the world, prepare to remember, and celebrate, the 500th anniversary of Luther's posting of the theses, this book offers a timely contribution and corrective. The intention is not to "debunk," or to belittle Luther's achievement, but rather to invite renewed reflection on how the past speaks to the present-and on how, all too often, the present creates the past in its own image and likeness.

Peter Marshall (Author), Anne Flosnik (Narrator)

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1619: Jamestown and the Forging of American Democracy

An extraordinary year in which American democracy and American slavery emerged hand in hand Along the banks of the James River, Virginia, during an oppressively hot spell in the middle of summer 1619, two events occurred within a few weeks of each other that would profoundly shape the course of history. In the newly built church at Jamestown, the General Assembly--the first gathering of a representative governing body in America--came together. A few weeks later, a battered privateer entered the Chesapeake Bay carrying the first African slaves to land on mainland English America. In 1619, historian James Horn sheds new light on the year that gave birth to the great paradox of our nation: slavery in the midst of freedom. This portentous year marked both the origin of the most important political development in American history, the rise of democracy, and the emergence of what would in time become one of the nation's greatest challenges: the corrosive legacy of racial inequality that has afflicted America since its beginning.

James Horn (Author), Dan Woren (Narrator)

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1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project

Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times' 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower compact in 1620. Was America founded on the auction block in Jamestown in 1619 or aboard the Mayflower in 1620? The controversy erupted in August 2019 when the New York Times announced its 1619 Project. The Times set to transform history by asserting that all the laws, material gains, and cultural achievements of Americans are rooted in the exploitation of African-Americans. Historians have pushed back, saying that the 1619 Project conjures a false narrative out of racial grievance.This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the traditional starting point for the American story-the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness-is right. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, including the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But if we want to understand where the quintessential ideas of self-government and ordered liberty came from, the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620 count much more than the near accidental arrival in Virginia fifteen months earlier of a Portuguese slave ship commandeered by English pirates.Schools across the country have already adopted The Times' radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is, to its bone, a 400-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should we teach children that what has always made America exceptional is its pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

Peter W. Wood (Author), Stephen Bowlby (Narrator)

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163256: A Memoir of Resistance

163256: A Memoir of Resistance is Michael Englishman's astonishing story of courage, resourcefulness, and moral fibre as a Dutch Jew during World War II and its aftermath, from the Nazi occupation of Holland in 1940, through his incarceration in numerous death and labour camps, to his eventual liberation by Allied soldiers in 1945 and his emigration to Canada. Surviving by his wits, Englishman escaped death time and again, committing daring acts of bravery to do what he thought was right-helping other prisoners escape and actively participating in the underground resistance. A man who refused to surrender his spirit despite the loss of his wife and his entire family to the Nazis, Englishman kept a promise he had made to a friend, and sought his friend's children after the war. With the children's mother, he made a new life in Canada, where he continued his resistance, tracking neo-Nazi cells and infiltrating their headquarters to destroy their files. Until his death in August 2007, Englishman remained active, speaking out against racism and hatred in seminars for young people. His gripping story should be widely read and will be of interest to scholars of auto/biography, World War II history, and the Holocaust.

Michael Englishman (Author), Garry Williams (Narrator)

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17 Carnations: The Royals, the Nazis and the Biggest Cover-Up in History

A meticulously researched historical tour de force about the secret ties among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, the Duke of Windsor, and Adolf Hitler before, during, and after World War II. Andrew Morton tells the story of the feckless Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor, his American wife, Wallis Simpson, the bizarre wartime Nazi plot to make him a puppet king after the invasion of Britain, and the attempted cover-up by Churchill, General Eisenhower, and King George VI of the duke's relations with Hitler. From the alleged affair between Simpson and the German foreign minister to the discovery of top secret correspondence about the man dubbed "the traitor king" and the Nazi high command, this is a saga of intrigue, betrayal, and deception suffused with a heady aroma of sex and suspicion. For the first time, Morton reveals the full story behind the cover-up of those damning letters and diagrams: the daring heist ordered by King George VI, the smooth duplicity of a Soviet spy as well as the bitter rows and recriminations among the British and American diplomats, politicians, and academics. Drawing on FBI documents, exclusive pictures, and material from the German, Russian, and British royal archives, as well as the personal correspondence of Churchill, Eisenhower, and the Windsors themselves, 17 CARNATIONS is a dazzling historical drama, full of adventure, intrigue, and startling revelations, written by a master of the genre.

Andrew Morton (Author), James Langton (Narrator)

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1774: The Long Year of Revolution

From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, 2018 president of the American Historical Association, a groundbreaking book--the first to look at the critical 'long year' of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the first Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord. This masterly work of historical writing, Mary Beth Norton's first in almost a decade, looks at the sixteen months during which the traditional loyalists to King George III began their discordant 'discussions' that led to their acceptance of the inevitability of war against the British Empire and to the clashes at Lexington and Concord in mid-April 1775. Drawing extensively on pamphlets, newspapers, and personal correspondence, Norton reconstructs colonial political discourse as it happened, showing the vigorous campaign mounted by conservatives criticizing congressional actions. But by then it was too late. In early 1775, governors throughout the colonies informed colonial officials in London that they were unable to thwart the increasing power of the committees and their allied provincial congresses. Although the Declaration of Independence would not be formally adopted until July 1776, Americans, even before the outbreak of war in April 1775, had in effect 'declared independence' by obeying the decrees of their new provincial governments rather than colonial officials. The much-anticipated new book by one of America's most dazzling historians--the culmination of more than four decades of Norton's research and thought.

Mary Beth Norton (Author), Kimberly Farr (Narrator)

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1775

What if the year we have long commemorated as America's defining moment was in fact misleading? What if the real events that signaled the historic shift from colony to country took place earlier, and that the true story of our nation's emergence reveals a more complicated - and divisive - birth process? In this major new work, iconoclastic historian and political chronicler Kevin Phillips upends the conventional reading of the American Revolution by puncturing the myth that 1776 was the struggle's watershed year. Mythology and omission have elevated 1776, but the most important year, rarely recognized, was 1775: the critical launching point of the war and Britain's imperial outrage and counterattack and the year during which America's commitment to revolution took bloody and irreversible shape. Phillips focuses on the great battlefields and events of 1775 - Congress's warlike economic ultimatums to king and parliament, New England's rage militaire, the panicked concentration of British troops in militant but untenable Boston, the stunning expulsion of royal governors up and down the seaboard, and the new provincial congresses and many hundreds of local committees that quickly reconstituted local authority in Patriot hands. These onrushing events delivered a sweeping control of territory and local government to the Patriots, one that Britain was never able to overcome. Seventeen seventy-five was the year in which Patriots captured British forts and fought battles from the Canadian frontier to the Carolinas, obtained the needed gunpowder in machinations that reached from the Baltic to West Africa and the Caribbean, and orchestrated the critical months of nation building in the backrooms of a secrecy-shrouded Congress. As Phillips writes, "The political realignment achieved amid revolution was unique - no other has come with simultaneous ballots and bullets." Surveying the political climate, economic structures, and military preparations, as well as the roles of ethnicity, religion, and class, Phillips tackles the eighteenth century with the same skill and perception he has shown in analyzing contemporary politics and economics. He mines rich material as he surveys different regions and different colonies and probes how the varying agendas and expectations at the grassroots level had a huge effect on how the country shaped itself. He details often overlooked facts about the global munitions trade; about the roles of Indians, slaves, and mercenaries; and about the ideological and religious factors that played into the revolutionary fervor. The result is a dramatic account brimming with original insights about the country we eventually became. Kevin Phillips's 1775 revolutionizes our understanding of America's origins.

Kevin Phillips (Author), Arthur Morey (Narrator)

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1776

In this stirring audiobook, David McCullough tells the intensely human story of those who marched with General George Washington in the year of the Declaration of Independence -- when the whole American cause was riding on their success, without which all hope for independence would have been dashed and the noble ideals of the Declaration would have amounted to little more than words on paper. Based on extensive research in both American and British archives, 1776 is the story of Americans in the ranks, men of every shape, size, and color, farmers, schoolteachers, shoemakers, no-accounts, and mere boys turned soldiers. And it is the story of the British commander, William Howe, and his highly disciplined redcoats who looked on their rebel foes with contempt and fought with a valor too little known. But it is the American commander-in-chief who stands foremost -- Washington, who had never before led an army in battle. The darkest hours of that tumultuous year were as dark as any Americans have known. Especially in our own tumultuous time, 1776 is powerful testimony to how much is owed to a rare few in that brave founding epoch, and what a miracle it was that things turned out as they did. Written as a companion work to his celebrated biography of John Adams, David McCullough's 1776 is another landmark in the literature of American history.

David McCullough (Author), David McCullough (Narrator)

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1777: Tipping Point at Saratoga

In the autumn of 1777, near Saratoga, New York, an inexperienced and improvised American army led by General Horatio Gates faced off against the highly trained British and German forces led by General John Burgoyne. The British strategy in confronting the Americans in upstate New York was to separate rebellious New England from the other colonies. Despite inferior organization and training, the Americans exploited access to fresh reinforcements of men and materiel, and ultimately handed the British a stunning defeat. Assimilating the archaeological remains from the battlefield along with the many letters, journals, and memoirs of the men and women in both camps, Dean Snow's 1777 provides a richly detailed narrative of the two battles fought at Saratoga over the course of thirty-three tense and bloody days. While the contrasting personalities of Gates and Burgoyne are well known, they are but two of the many actors who make up the larger drama of Saratoga. Snow highlights famous and obscure participants alike, from the brave but now notorious turncoat Benedict Arnold to Frederika von Riedesel, the wife of a British major general who later wrote an important eyewitness account of the battles.

Dean Snow (Author), Bob Souer (Narrator)

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1811 German Coast Uprising, The: The History and Legacy of America’s Largest Slave Revolt

While Nat Turner’s rebellion remains famous today, a far larger uprising took place a generation earlier. In January 1811, hundreds of slaves in Louisiana attempted to make a new beginning for themselves or die trying. Armed with muskets, cane knives, and axes, and wearing stolen United States militia uniforms, they set out to conquer the city of New Orleans. The goal was to establish a free republic where slavery was outlawed and blacks had control over their own lives. Understandably discontented with their status and no longer willing to accept it, they were ready to engage in extreme violence to win their freedom, fully aware that death would be the only alternative. Between the arrival of first slave ship in Virginia in 1619 and the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, there were more than 250 incidents of rebellions by 10 or more slaves on present-day United States territory, dating as far back as the 1739 Stono rebellion in South Carolina. But the German Coast Uprising in 1811 was the largest act of armed resistance against slavery in American history, and more than 100 slaves died during or as a result of the German Coast Uprising, whereas fewer than 30 were killed in action or as punishment for Nat Turner’s uprising. The 1811 insurrection also involved the largest mix of slave participants, combining African- and American-born slaves, and both men and women. The rebels of 1811 were inspired to a great degree by the most successful slave uprising in history, which had occurred the previous decade in the French colony of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti). There, thousands of enslaved workers there launched an organized rebellion, expelling all whites from the territory and establishing an independent state. The German Coast Uprising was also inspired by charismatic, powerful, and dedicated leaders.

Charles River Editors (Author), Daniel Houle (Narrator)

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1812

The war of 1812 would either make America a global power sweeping all the way to the Pacific or break it into small pieces bound to mighty England. It was a second revolution of sorts to prove to the British that America had to be taken seriously. The principal players in this drama were James and Dolley Madison and Andrew and Rachel Jackson. Their courage and determination would shape America's destiny.

David Nevin (Author), Ralph Cosham (Narrator)

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