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The Age of Reconstruction: The Legacy of the Civil War and the New Birth of Freedom Abroad

How Union victory in the American Civil War inspired democratic reforms, revolutions, and emancipation movements globally In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the US, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento. Some European liberals even called for a 'United States of Europe.' Yet for all its achievements and optimism, this 'new birth of freedom' was short-lived. By the 1890s, Reconstruction had been undone in the US and abroad and America had become an exclusionary democracy based on white supremacy-and a very different kind of model to the world. At home and abroad, America's Reconstruction was, as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, 'the greatest and most important step toward world democracy of all men of all races ever taken in the modern world.' The Age of Reconstruction is a bracing history of a remarkable period when democracy, having survived the great test of the Civil War, was ascendant around the Atlantic world.

Don H. Doyle (Author), Paul Brion (Narrator)

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Underwriters of the United States: How Insurance Shaped the American Founding

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation's institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.

Hannah Farber (Author), Linda Jones (Narrator)

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The Blood Countess: A Tale of Deception, Disinformation, and History’s Deadliest Woman

THE BLOOD COUNTESS is an ambitious, sweeping investigation into the singularly fascinating case of Elizabeth Báthory, a woman who, until now, has been known as 'the Western World’s most prolific female murderer.” If The Dark Queens is about the systemic erasure of powerful women, then THE BLOOD COUNTESS is about the culturally sanctioned, coordinated smearing of one, how it happens and why, which leads to even bigger questions: how do we construct our personal and cultural realities? How do we parse the truth? THE BLOOD COUNTESS will, of course, appeal to the same readers who fell in love with The Dark Queens, but it will undoubtedly bring in fresh audiences: true crime aficionados, lovers of legal sagas, fans of the Elizabethan era, readers already aware of the Báthory legend, etc. It is the sort of undeniably juicy, complex narrative that will have both academic circles and book clubs arguing for days, as it does what the best historical non-fiction does: holds up a mirror so we can see our own time more clearly, all while still being a wild, entertaining ride.

Shelley Puhak (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Air and Love: A Story of Food, Family and Belonging

A gorgeous, evocative memoir of family, food and migration. As a child, Or Rosenboim's knowledge of her family history came mainly through the food her grandmothers cooked for her - bright orange carrots tzimes in buttery caramel sauce, round kneidlach balls in hot chicken broth, cinnamon-scented noodle kugel, stuffed vine leaves, Oshi-bahsh (herby green rice with a squeeze of fresh lemon juice), a 'Turkish salad' of red peppers and aubergine in tomato sauce or a slice of rich buttery almond and walnut cake. Or always knew that her family had a complex past, but it was not until both of her grandmothers died in 2017 that she reopened their recipe books and began to seriously explore the facts of their history - her history - for the first time. In Air and Love, Or follows the migration routes of her ancestors, conjuring the journeys they took and lives they forged in the turbulent and ever-shifting Europe of the twentieth century. This family history, of displacement and escape, is not an unusual one, but it is one often overshadowed by the massive political shifts and conflicts of the period. Opening in Samarkand and concluding in London, Or retraces a network of journeys via which her ancestors travelled to the Middle East and back, always in search of safety and a better life, and always cooking along the way. The paths they took were long established migrant routes whose existence paved the way for the Europe we recognise today - and yet these journeys, and this long tradition of migration, would now be largely impossible. The result is a beguiling mixture of history, memoir, travel and food, offering a fresh and deeply human retelling of some of the major stories of the twentieth century.

Or Rosenboim (Author), Or Rosenboim, TBD (Narrator)

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Hercules

Scott Bateman (Author), TBD (Narrator)

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Paradise of the Damned: The True Story of an Obsessive Quest for El Dorado, the Legendary City of Go

From the bestselling author of Born to Be Hanged comes a transporting account of the obsessive quest to find El Dorado, set against the backdrop of Elizabethan England's political intrigues and the rival Spanish conquistadors vying for El Dorado's treasure. As early as 1530, rumors of El Dorado, the mythical city of gold, beckoned to European colonizers. Whether there was any truth to the story remained to be seen, but the allure of wealth alone was enough to ensnare dozens of would-be heroes and glory-hungry hopefuls. Among them was Sir Walter Raleigh: ambitious courtier, confidant to Queen Elizabeth, and, before long, El Dorado fanatic. Throughout his tenuous rise to prominence and fall from grace, the unwavering siren song of El Dorado hypnotized Raleigh. The glittering promise of its wealth appeared to be the solution to all Raleigh's troubles, from his long imprisonment in the Tower of London to his multitude of cutthroat enemies. Captivating, witty, and lush with historical detail, Keith Thomson's Paradise of the Damned charts Raleigh's quixotic search for El Dorado-as well as the many other doomed voyages that preceded and accompanied it.

Keith Thomson (Author), TBD, Timothy Andrés Pabon (Narrator)

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My Black Country: A Journey Through Country Music's Black Past, Present, and Future

Alice Randall, award-winning professor, songwriter, and author with a "lively, engaging, and often wise" (The New York Times Book Review) voice, offers a lyrical, introspective, and unforgettable account of her past and her search for the first family of Black country music. Country music had brought Randall and her activist mother together and even gave Randall a singular distinction in American music history: she is the first Black woman to cowrite a number one country hit, Trisha Yearwood's "XXX's and OOO's". Randall found inspiration and comfort in the sounds and history of the first family of Black country music: DeFord Bailey, Lil Hardin, Ray Charles, Charley Pride, and Herb Jeffries who, together, made up a community of Black Americans rising through hard times to create simple beauty, true joy, and sometimes profound eccentricity. What emerges in My Black Country is a celebration of the most American of music genres and the radical joy in realizing the power of Black influence on American culture. As country music goes through a fresh renaissance today, with a new wave of Black artists enjoying success, My Black Country is the perfect gift for longtime country fans and a vibrant introduction to a new generation of listeners who previously were not invited to give the genre a chance.

Alice Randall (Author), Alice Randall, TBD (Narrator)

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Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island: The World War II Battle That Saved Marine Corps Aviation

The pivotal true story of the first fifty-three days of the standoff between Imperial Japanese and a handful of Marine aviators defending the Americans dug in at Guadalcanal, from the New York Times bestselling author of Indestructible and Race of Aces. On August 20, 1942, twelve Marine dive-bombers and nineteen Marine fighters landed at Guadalcanal. Their mission: defeat the Japanese navy and prevent it from sending more men and supplies to "Starvation Island," as Guadalcanal was nicknamed. The Japanese were turning the remote, jungle-covered mountain in the south Solomon Islands into an air base from which they could attack the supply lines between the U.S. and Australia. The night after the Marines landed and captured the partially completed airfield, the Imperial Navy launched a surprise night attack on the Allied fleet offshore, resulting in the worst defeat the U.S. Navy suffered in the 20th century, which prompted the abandonment of the Marines on Guadalcanal. The Marines dug in, and waited for help, as those thirty-one pilots and twelve gunners flew against the Japanese, shooting down eighty-three planes in less than two months, while the dive bombers, carried out over thirty attacks on the Japanese fleet. Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island follows Major John L. Smith, a magnetic leader who became America's top fighter ace for the time; Captain Marion Carl, the Marine Corps' first ace, and one of the few survivors of his squadron at the Battle of Midway. He would be shot down and forced to make his way back to base through twenty-five miles of Japanese-held jungle. And Major Richard Mangrum, the lawyer-turned-dive-bomber commander whose inexperienced men wrought havoc on the Japanese Navy. New York Times bestselling author John R. Bruning depicts the desperate effort to stop the Japanese long enough for America to muster reinforcements and turn the tide at Guadalcanal. Not just the story of an incredible stand on a distant jungle island, Fifty-Three Days on Starvation Island also explores the consequences of victory to the men who secured it at a time when America had been at war for less than a year and its public had yet to fully understand what that meant. The home front they returned to after their jungle ordeal was a surreal montage of football games, nightclubs, fine dining with America's elites, and inside looks at dysfunctional defense industries more interested in fleecing the government than properly equipping the military. Bruning tells the story of how one battle reshaped the Marine Corps and propelled its veterans into the highest positions of power just in time to lead the service into a new war in Southeast Asia.

John R Bruning (Author), Brian Troxell, TBD (Narrator)

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Fighting the Night: Iwo Jima, World War II, and a Flyer's Life

From the acclaimed and best-selling author of Hemingway's Boat, the profoundly moving story of his father's wartime service as a night fighter pilot, and the prices he and his fellow soldiers paid for their acts of selfless, patriotic sacrifice In the fall of 1944, Joe Paul Hendrickson, the author's father, kissed his twenty-one-year-old wife and two baby children goodbye. The twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant, pilot of a famed P-61 Black Widow, was leaving for the war. He and his night fighter squadron were sent to Iwo Jima, where, for the last five and a half months of World War II, he flew approximately seventy-five missions, largely in pitch-black conditions. His wife would wait out the war at the home of her small-town Ohio parents, one of the countless numbers of American family members shouldering the burden of being left behind. Joe Paul, the son of a Depression-poor Kentucky sharecropper, was fresh out of high school in 1937 when he enlisted in mechanic school in the peacetime Army Air Corps. Eventually, he was able to qualify for flight school. After marriage, and with the war on, the young officer and his bride crisscrossed the country, airfield to airfield, base to base: Santa Ana, Yuma, Kissimmee, Bakersfield, Orlando, La Junta, Fresno. He volunteered for night fighters and the newly arrived and almost mythic Black Widow. A world away, the carnage continued. As Paul Hendrickson tracks his parents' journey, together and separate, both stateside and overseas, he creates a vivid portrait of a hard-to-know father whose time in the war, he comes to understand, was something truly heroic, but never without its hidden and unhidden psychic costs. Bringing to life an iconic moment of American history, and the tragedy of all wars, Fighting the Night is an intense and powerful story of violence and love, forgiveness and loss. And it is a tribute to those who got plunged into service, in the best years of their lives, and the sacrifices they and their loved ones made, then and thereafter.

Paul Hendrickson (Author), Fred Sanders, Paul Hendrickson, TBD (Narrator)

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The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution's Original Me

The New York Times bestselling author of The Year of Living Biblically attempts to follow the original meaning of the Constitution in search of answers to one of the most pressing issues of our time: How should we interpret America's foundational document? A.J. Jacobs learned the hard way that donning a tricorne hat and marching around Manhattan with a 1700s musket will earn you a lot of strange looks. In the wake of several controversial rulings by the Supreme Court and the on-going debate about how the Constitution should be interpreted, Jacobs set out to understand what it means to live by the Constitution. In The Year of Living Constitutionally, A.J. Jacobs tries to get inside the minds of the Founding Fathers by living as closely as possible to the original meaning of the Constitution. He asserts his right to free speech by writing his opinions on parchment with a quill and handing them out to strangers in Times Square. He consents to quartering a soldier, as is his Third Amendment right. He turns his home into a traditional 1790s household by lighting candles instead of using electricity, boiling mutton, and-because women were not allowed to sign contracts- feebly attempting to take over his wife's day job, which involves a lot of contract negotiations. The book blends unforgettable adventures-delivering a handwritten petition to Congress, applying for a Letter of Marque to become a legal pirate for the government, and battling redcoats as part of a Revolutionary War reenactment group--with dozens of interviews from constitutional experts from both sides. Jacobs dives deep into originalism and living constitutionalism, the two rival ways of interpreting the document. Much like he did with the Bible in The Year of Living Biblically, Jacobs provides a crash course on our Constitution as he experiences the benefits and perils of living like it's the 1790s. He relishes, for instance, the slow thinking of the era, free from social media alerts. But also discovers the progress we've made since 1789 when married women couldn't own property. Now more than ever, Americans need to understand the meaning and value of the Constitution. As politicians and Supreme Court Justices wage a high-stakes battle over how literally we should interpret the Constitution, A.J. Jacobs provides an entertaining yet illuminating look into how this storied document fits into our democracy today.

A.J. Jacobs (Author), A.J. Jacobs, TBD (Narrator)

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The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation

A New York Times-bestselling historian charts how and why societies from ancient Greece to the modern era chose to utterly destroy their foes, and warns that similar wars of obliteration are possible in our time War can settle disputes, topple tyrants, and bend the trajectory of civilization-sometimes to the breaking point. From Troy to Hiroshima, moments when war has ended in utter annihilation have reverberated through the centuries, signaling the end of political systems, cultures, and epochs. Though much has changed over the millennia, human nature remains the same. Modern societies are not immune from the horror of a war of extinction. In The End of Everything, military historian Victor Davis Hanson narrates a series of sieges and sackings that span the age of antiquity to the conquest of the New World to show how societies descend into barbarism and obliteration. In the stories of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan, he depicts war's drama, violence, and folly. Highlighting the naivete that plagued the vanquished and the wrath that justified mass slaughter, Hanson delivers a sobering call to contemporary readers to heed the lessons of obliteration lest we blunder into catastrophe once again.

Victor Davis Hanson (Author), Bob Souer, TBD (Narrator)

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The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration

The collective voice of Japanese Americans defined by a specific moment in time: the four years of World War II during which the US government expelled resident aliens and its own citizens from their homes and imprisoned 125,000 of them in American concentration camps, based solely upon the race they shared with a wartime enemy. A Penguin Classic This anthology presents a new vision that recovers and reframes the literature produced by the people targeted by the actions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress to deny Americans of Japanese ancestry any individual hearings or other due process after the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. From nearly seventy selections of fiction, poetry, essays, memoirs, and letters emerges a shared story of the struggle to retain personal integrity in the face of increasing dehumanization - all anchored by the key government documents that incite the action. The selections favor the pointed over the poignant, and the unknown over the familiar, with several new translations among previously unseen works that have been long overlooked on the shelf, buried in the archives, or languished unread in the Japanese language. The writings are presented chronologically so that readers can trace the continuum of events as the incarcerees experienced it. The contributors span incarcerees, their children born in or soon after the camps, and their descendants who reflect on the long-term consequences of mass incarceration for themselves and the nation. Many of the voices are those of protest. Some are those of accommodation. All are authentic. Together they form an epic narrative with a singular vision of America's past, one with disturbing resonances with the American present.

Frank Abe, Tbd (Author), Frank Abe, Greg Watanabe, Keone Young, Ren Hanami, TBD, Traci Kato-Kiriyama (Narrator)

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