Audiobooks narrated by Jim Johnston

The Battle of Breitenfeld: The History and Legacy of the First Major Protestant Victory of the Thirt

The Thirty Years' War was one of the most horrific conflicts in history, and though it is widely viewed as a religious struggle, that was only part of the complicated war. Calvinists and Lutherans did not get along, and both persecuted some of the more radical Anabaptist sects. At the same time, one major motivation behind the war was Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II’s determination to rule all of the empire and not be just a figurehead. There were struggles between rulers and their estates over power, and Catholic France later entered the war on the side of the Protestants in order to counter the Habsburgs’ power. The Battle of Breitenfeld, fought in September 1631, was one of the most decisive moments of the war. It was the first major Protestant victory and widely considered the crowning achievement of Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus’ military career. Through his establishment of communication and supply lines at strategic points across the Baltic Sea, the securing of Protestant alliances, and his use of combined arms, amongst his other trademark techniques, the Swedish forces, against all odds, defeated their rivals. Such was the devastation inflicted upon their opponents that the Count of Tilly, the chief commander of the Catholic League's armies, had no other choice but to retreat. 6,000 or so Catholic soldiers were captured, many of them later incorporated into the Protestant forces. Whatever remained of the survivors vanished into the dark of the night.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Stand Watie: The Life and Legacy of the Cherokee Chief Who Became a Confederate General

Stand Watie’s life connects the traditional Cherokee homeland in Tennessee and Georgia, the fight within the tribe over leaving for the West or staying on their homeland and trying to resist, and the Trail of Tears. At the same time, his life also includes the ongoing split between mixed-blood and full-blood Cherokee in the Cherokee Nation, and the chaos of Indian Territory during the Civil War. On the surface, Indian Territory was peaceful and fairly prosperous, but old resentments simmered under the surface. The most dangerous of these was in the Cherokee Nation. Following the Cherokee removal, the leaders of the faction of the tribe that had actually signed the Treaty of New Echota suffered violence. There had been a law that giving away Cherokee land was punishable by death, and several of the leaders who signed the treaty were murdered. Stand Watie was one of the signers, and he barely escaped, but one of his brothers was executed. The Principal Chief was John Ross. He and his faction managed to retain political control of the Cherokee tribe, but there was lasting enmity between the Watie and Ross factions of the tribe. In a broad sense, the signers of the hated treaty were mixed-blood Cherokee, and the resistance had been led by full-bloods. Stand Watie headed the mixed-blood faction and John Ross the full-blood faction. Ironically, John Ross himself was mixed-blood and Watie was a full-blood, but regardless, this tribal split had important ramifications for the Cherokee in the coming war. Like the country as a whole, the Cherokee Nation was split over the question of slavery, and with an estimated 100 slaves owned, Watie was the biggest native slaveholder in the region. At the start of the war, Watie was commissioned as a colonel in Confederate service and later as a brigadier general. His 1st Cherokee Mounted Rifles Regiment fought more engagements than any other Confederate unit west of the Mississippi River.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Bill Pickett: The Life of the Legendary Rodeo and Wild West Show Performer

The Wild West made legends out of many men and women through the embellishment of their stories, but it was Buffalo Bill Cody who truly brought the Wild West to life and provided the images that people still associate with the 19th century West today. Though he had a long career that spanned service in the Civil War, trapping, and even a stint with the Pony Express, Buffalo Bill eventually became synonymous with his world-famous Wild West Show. By depicting stereotypical Western scenes like riding the Pony Express, and gunfights between cowboys and Indians, Buffalo Bill became one of the men most responsible for establishing how the public remembered the Wild West, and the show influenced subsequent film and literature. The show also featured several kinds of activities that are still part of rodeos today, including riding bucking broncos, roping livestock, and target shooting. Almost absent in the perceptions of modern America is the comprehension of African Americans participating so prolifically in the building of the nation. Print fiction idealizing the cowboy life to Eastern readers would not depict what had ignited the war for which so many had an utter revulsion. The black man of the post-war years did not inspire the white spirit so essential for reveling in the old system. The 20th century’s television and cinematic offerings operated on the same drive, and the existence of black cattle workers was all but blotted out. Indeed, many of the modern age are barely aware that an African-American ever “stepped foot on the West bank of the Mississippi River.”[1] No one saw the black cowboy on screen or in print, the two information industries that shaped our perception of America’s westward expansion. Therefore, a collective assumption that they must never have existed at all was nationally internalized.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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American Utopias: The History of Famous Attempts to Establish Utopian Societies in the United States

In the 19th century, the young United States was exposed to the profound changes that historians call the Market Revolution. Cities experienced drastic changes as manufacturing and trade created jobs that hungry job seekers from the countryside migrated towards, but the hype triumphed over the realities, and more unemployed recent migrants lived in the cities than the number of gainfully employed workers. Urban stresses dominated American cities and also attracted the attention of reformers. The rural areas also experienced profound changes from the intrusion of commercial trade, which penetrated the agricultural regions and affected the prices of supplies and transport. This also affected the profits from foodstuff and produce, all of which average rural Americans could not control. Left to the mercy of the markets, while the rapid era of canal building and the first railroads brought the countryside further into the grips of the cities, religious revivals of the Second Great Awakening took over, and so too did new experiments arise to provide alternative models of the capitalistic system that left people at the mercy of boom and bust cycles. For most utopian societies, the common element was a charismatic figure who had a vision of how to lead the people out of an untenable present into a better future by committing themselves to a new set of rules and practices. They envisioned better futures at a physical location intended to be the root of a movement that would spread and redeem the community.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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The Battle of Castle Itter: The History of World War II’s Strangest Skirmish

The battle for Berlin would technically begin on April 16, 1945, and though it ended in a matter of weeks, it produced some of the war’s most climactic events and had profound implications on the immediate future. By the time the fighting mostly came to an end on May 2, Hitler had already committed suicide and the chain of German surrenders in the field outside of Berlin took off like dominoes. Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel signed Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, and news of the final surrender of the Germans was celebrated as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day) on May 8, 1945. One of the most crucial aspects of the final fighting was that while some Germans gave up and others committed suicide, there were others holding out or trying to escape, and that produced one of the war’s most unusual scenes. World War II brought about the creation and breaking of a number of alliances, which meant German and Soviet soldiers coordinated together before bitterly fighting each other after Germany’s invasion of Russia in 1941. Similarly, Italian soldiers began the war fighting the Allies until, in July 1943, Mussolini was deposed and Italian soldiers found themselves fighting with the Allies against the Germans. But neither of those situations truly compares to a skirmish fought in early May 1945, which featured Americans and Germans fighting together for the first and only time. And as if that wasn’t unbelievable enough, they were fighting the Waffen-SS. At stake was an Austrian castle that had served as a prison for some of the most senior French prisoners of war, including two former Prime Ministers. The SS had been responsible for guarding the castle, but after the guards abandoned it with the war coming to an end, American and German soldiers who had already surrendered defended the prisoners at the site. Nonetheless, in early May, a Waffen-SS unit was detailed to retake the castle.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Juneteenth: The History and Legacy of the Holiday that Commemorates the End of Slavery in the South

Inevitably, for many across the South, the news of the Emancipation Proclamation arrived slowly, and in other locales, the new was withheld entirely, sometimes by years. Slaveowners were not simply going to give up slaves, and in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, others created statewide legislation to preserve the old order under a different system of semantics. Credible African American citizenship did not come in a single wave, but intermittently through various regions and to varying degrees over the decades since. As of June 19, 2021, Independence Day has been joined by a second federal holiday, a bookend to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation that gives rise and adds a voice to the 13th Amendment and celebrates the freedoms and equal citizenship of all black citizens of the United States. In future years, “Juneteenth” will be marked alongside Independence Day as a celebration to include those who were barred from the benefits of the original event and intent. Viewed as an enhancement to and a completion of the original independence movement, Juneteenth merits the same community reverence and celebration based on the belief, in the words of Opal Lee, that “none of us [is] free till we’re all free.” While Lee was described by President Joseph Biden as the “Grandmother of the Juneteenth movement,” she and others continue to worry that Juneteenth will become only a “black” holiday rather than a national one. Michael Erikson of Deseret News asserted that abolition of slavery is in itself “a profoundly religious event,” and should therefore remain free of political rancor or social partisanship.”

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Aztlán: The History and Mystery of the Aztec’s Ancestral Home

Unlike the Mayans, the Aztecs are not widely viewed or remembered with nuance, in part because their own leader burned extant Aztec writings and rewrote a mythologized history explaining his empire’s dominance less than a century before the Spanish arrived. Naturally, Cortés and other Spaniards depicted the Aztecs as savages greatly in need of conversion to Catholicism, so while the Mayans are remembered for their astronomy, numeral system, and calendar, the Aztecs have primarily been remembered in a far narrower way, despite continuing to be a source of pride to Mexicans through the centuries. One of the most elusive topics about the Aztecs concern their origins, in particular the city of Aztlán, which is said to be the place from which the Aztecs came. To this day, the physical location of Aztlán has yet to be found, leading to debates about where it could have been, or even whether it was simply a mythological location. For centuries, historians and archaeologists have studied ancient documents and codices in an attempt to physically locate this ancestral city, while other scholars maintain that Aztlán is nothing but an origin myth, and there is not enough evidence in the sources to suggest that it was ever a real place. Many theories about Aztlán have been proposed throughout the centuries, some strongly based on information provided by historical and archaeological evidence. Others are based purely on conjecture. There are even some who have suggested that Aztlán corresponds to the mythical Atlantis based on a series of similarities in the descriptions of both places. For example, Plato described Atlantis as a city built over a lake, just as Aztlán was said to be.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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H.P. Lovecraft: The Life and Career of the Influential Horror Fiction Author

What would you get if you mixed Edgar Allan Poe, Alfred Hitchcock and Stephen King? The answer might be something resembling Howard Phillips Lovecraft, an extremely influential poet and author who mixed science fiction, horror and fantasy into a subgenre known as “weird fiction.” Perhaps nothing encapsulates weird fiction like his creation of the monster Cthulhu, which has been used by other writers to spawn a fictional universe and mythology centered around Cthulhu. There is no greater accolade for a writer than for their name to become an adjective. For example, any story that deals with a dystopian future is likely to be called “Orwellian” following the success of the novel 1984 by English writer George Orwell. But within the horror genre, Lovecraft’s work, filled with madness and brooding menace and set in a semi-fictional world of his own creation, gave rise to the use of the term “Lovecraftian” to describe similar works. Despite this accolade, however, Lovecraft achieved almost no commercial success and very little recognition during his lifetime. His output also seems disproportionately small compared to his current influence - he never wrote a full-length novel, and most of his fiction took the form of short stories published in various magazines. It was only after his death that his fiction was regarded as more significant than the bulk of horror fiction written in the 1920s and 1930s.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Marne, The: The History and Legacy of the Two Major Battles Fought along the Marne River during Worl

If trench warfare was an inevitability during the war, it is only because the events leading up to the First Battle of the Marne were quite different. The armies at the beginning of the war moved quickly through the land, but the First Battle of the Marne devolved into a bloody pitched battle that led to the construction of trenches after the Germans retreated, blocked in their pursuit of Paris. When the aftermath disintegrated into a war between trenches, some Germans thought they had the upper hand since they were occupying French territory, but with fewer soldiers than the combined Allied nations and fewer resources and supplies, it was possibly only a matter of time before they were ultimately defeated. The commander of the German armies, General Helmuth von Moltke, allegedly said to Kaiser Wilhelm II immediately after the First Battle of the Marne, 'Your Majesty, we have lost the war.' Winston Churchill himself would later reference that anecdote, writing, “Whether General von Moltke actually said to the Emperor, ‘Majesty, we have lost the war,’ we do not know. We know anyhow that with a prescience greater in political than in military affairs, he wrote to his wife on the night of the 9th, ‘Things have not gone well. The fighting east of Paris has not gone in our favour, and we shall have to pay for the damage we have done.’' When the United States joined the war in April 1917, it began mobilizing 4 million soldiers to join the war. The Central Powers knew that it would take months before the United States could land a substantial number of troops in Europe to join the fighting, and the Germans hoped to force the Allied powers to quit before the United States could make a difference. Thus, the Germans’ Spring Offensive began in March 1918, using new infantry tactics to move on the most lightly defended points of the Allied trenches.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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The Mummies of Ancient Egypt: The History and Legacy of the Egyptians' Mummification Process

Today, Egyptian practices for death and the afterlife are intimately associated with mummies, which have both fascinated and terrified people for centuries. In countless movies, these preserved dead bodies from ancient times are often shown to be mystical creatures that come back from the dead to exact revenge. In the same vein, over the centuries, Egyptian society suggested that there was a tomb curse or "curse of the pharaohs" that ensured anyone who disturbed their tombs, including thieves and archaeologists, would suffer bad luck or even death. Naturally, there were warnings inscribed on the tombs of many buried Egyptians, typically made in an effort to deter grave robbers. One inscription dating back to the 3rd millennium BCE tomb of Khentika Ikhekhi reads, 'As for all men who shall enter this my tomb... impure... there will be judgment... an end shall be made for him... I shall seize his neck like a bird... I shall cast the fear of myself into him.' In reality, Egyptian mummies have been preserved throughout time due to the meticulous process that created them, and while Egyptian mummies are the most famous, there are preserved bodies from all around the world from across history. Some of these mummies were accidents of nature, while others were more intentional, preserved through human intervention. In Egypt, the first mummies seem to have been natural, but after their discovery, mummification became a time-honored tradition in this ancient civilization.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Second Battle of the Marne, The: The History and Legacy of the Last German Offensive on the Western

For much of 1917, things went the Germans’ way. With the Bolshevik Revolution underway, the Germans were able to move soldiers to the Western front as the Russians quit the war. Moreover, the Allied powers had failed badly in its Nivelle Offensive in May 1917 and suffered a defeat in November against at the Battle of Caporetto in Slovenia. Unbelievably, the French and British had not bothered to coordinate their commands until after those defeats, but they finally formed a Supreme Council to coordinate their armies’ movements and strategies. Despite those successes, when the United States joined the war in April 1917, it began mobilizing 4 million soldiers to join the war. The Central Powers knew that it would take months before the United States could land a substantial number of troops in Europe to join the fighting, and the Germans hoped to force the Allied powers to quit before the United States could make a difference. Thus, the Germans’ Spring Offensive began in March 1918, using new infantry tactics to move on the most lightly defended points of the Allied trenches. The Germans quickly obtained a breakthrough and broke the Allied lines, pushing the Allied forces back nearly 40 miles, and the Germans were once again within less than 100 miles of Paris. Once again, however, the Allied powers halted the Germans’ drive, with the help of reinforcing American and Australian troops. The Germans were right back where they started by July 1918, at which time about 10,000 Americans were arriving in France each day. After four years of brutal, savage, and devastating fighting, the battle fought there in July 1918 marked the beginning of the end of the war as the Allied forces begin to put the German invaders on the run. In the wake of the victory, the Allied Powers began a counteroffensive known as the Hundred Days Offensive in August 1918 that was highly successful in pushing the Germans backward.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Visigothic Kingdom of Tolosa, The: The History and Legacy of the Goths’ Kingdom in Gaul during the C

The birth of Europe as people know it today was hardly an easy and effortless process. The Old World was reshaped by centuries of continuous wars, raids, and the falls and rises of empires. The most turbulent of these events happened at the beginning of the Middle Ages, from the 3rd-7th centuries CE. This was the time when the old slave society gave way to the feudal system that marked the latter Middle Ages, and it was also a period of battles between the Roman Empire and various barbarian peoples. The Roman Emperors waged wars, made and broke alliances, and bribed and negotiated with chieftains of various “barbarian” tribes to preserve the territorial integrity of their Empires, but the razor-edge division between the civilized world of the Romans and that of the “savages” that threatened their borders was dulling with every decade. In fact, the constant need for army recruits swelled the Roman legions with barbarian foederati, a phenomenon that forced both the Romans and Byzantines to use a very subtle way of playing the barbarian tribes against each other via diplomatic schemes and bountiful rewards. A new religion was also taking root: Christianity became a reason for both unification and division, as different people adopted different variations of its teachings. It goes without saying that the Goths played an integral part in the history of Europe during this time, and they remain among the most notorious and controversial groups in history. By the 4th century CE, The Goths were among the prominent barbarian groups who became a threat to the Roman Empire, but they also had contacts with the Romans well before then, and they even traded for awhile. The two branches of the Goths that are best known, the Visigoths and Ostrogoths, stared down the Roman Empire as it neared its collapse and supplanted it with a kingdom in Italy in the 5th and 6th centuries respectively.

Charles River Editors (Author), Jim Johnston (Narrator)

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Audiobooks Narrated by Jim Johnston