
American Civil Wars
A Continental History, 1850-1873
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Narrated by:
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Graham Winton
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By:
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Alan Taylor
About this listen
A MASTERFUL HISTORY OF THE CIVIL WAR AND ITS REVERBERATIONS ACROSS THE CONTINENT BY A TWO-TIME PULITZER PRIZE WINNER.
In a fast-paced narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, the award-winning historian Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which North America’s three largest countries—the United States, Mexico, and Canada—all transformed themselves into nations.
The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military history and the drama of emancipation the highlights. Taylor relies on vivid characters to carry the story, from Joseph Hooker, whose timidity in crisis was exploited by Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson in the Union defeat at Chancellorsville, to Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Black abolitionists whose critical work in Canada and the United States advanced emancipation and the enrollment of Black soldiers in Union armies.
The outbreak of the Civil War created a continental power vacuum that allowed French forces to invade Mexico in 1862 and set up an empire ruled by a Habsburg archduke. This inflamed the ongoing power struggle between Mexico’s Conservatives—landowners, the military, the Catholic Church—and Liberal supporters of social democracy, led ably by Benito Juarez. Along the southwestern border, Mexico’s Conservative forces made common cause with the Confederacy, while General James Carleton violently suppressed Apaches and Navajos in New Mexico and Arizona. When the Union triumph restored the continental balance of power, French forces withdrew, and Liberals consolidated a republic in Mexico.
Canada was meantime fending off a potential rupture between French-speaking Catholics in Quebec and English-speakers in Ontario. When Union victory raised the threat of American invasion, Canadian leaders pressed for a continent-wide confederation joined by a transcontinental railroad. The rollicking story of liberal ideals, political venality, and corporate corruption marked the dawn of the Gilded Age in North America.
“American Civil Wars demonstrates, as no previous work has, the great political transformations sweeping all of North America during the middle of the nineteenth century. With a geographical frame embracing Canada and Mexico as well as the United States, Alan Taylor once again challenges and deepens our historical perspective.”—Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America: A History
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- The Rise and Fall of Weimar Germany
- By: Harald Jähner
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Out of the ashes of the First World War, Germany launched an unprecedented political project: its first democratic government. The Weimar Republic, named for the city where it was established, endured for only fifteen years before it was toppled by the insurgent Nazi Party in 1933. In Vertigo, prizewinning historian Harald Jähner tells the Republic’s full story, capturing a nation caught in a whirlwind of uncertainty and struggling toward a better future.
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How. Did It Happen?
- By Bettyb on 10-19-24
By: Harald Jähner
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American Republics
- A Continental History of the United States 1783-1850
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Graham Winton
- Length: 14 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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In this beautifully written history of America’s formative period, a preeminent historian upends the traditional story of a young nation confidently marching to its continent-spanning destiny.
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Helps the dots of history to today.
- By Tascha F. on 06-26-21
By: Alan Taylor
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Hero of Two Worlds
- The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution
- By: Mike Duncan
- Narrated by: Mike Duncan
- Length: 17 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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From the massively popular podcaster and New York Times best-selling author comes the story of the Marquis de Lafayette's lifelong quest to protect the principles of democracy, told through the lens of the three revolutions he participated in: the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Revolution of 1830.
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Thrillingly storytelling — brilliant narration
- By Byron on 08-24-21
By: Mike Duncan
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Stalin's War
- A New History of World War II
- By: Sean McMeekin
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 24 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east.
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Sean McMeekin Does It Again!
- By Stephen F (SPFJR) on 04-21-21
By: Sean McMeekin
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American Revolutions
- A Continental History, 1750-1804
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 18 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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The American Revolution is often portrayed as a high-minded, orderly event whose capstone, the Constitution, provided the ideal framework for a democratic, prosperous nation. Alan Taylor, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, gives us a different creation story in this magisterial history of the nation's founding. Rising out of the continental rivalries of European empires and their native allies, Taylor's Revolution builds like a ground fire overspreading Britain's mainland colonies, fueled by local conditions, destructive, hard to quell.
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Best book on the American Revolution that I have read
- By Peter Stephens on 11-16-16
By: Alan Taylor
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Beyond the Wall
- A History of East Germany
- By: Katja Hoyer
- Narrated by: Sam Peter Jackson
- Length: 16 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the German Democratic Republic presented a radically different Germany than what had come before and what exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics. Acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer sets aside the usual Cold War caricatures of the GDR to offer a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country.
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Good summary of ordinary life in the DDR
- By Z' on 03-09-24
By: Katja Hoyer
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Bernoulli's Fallacy
- Statistical Illogic and the Crisis of Modern Science
- By: Aubrey Clayton
- Narrated by: Tim H. Dixon
- Length: 15 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it.
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Rigorously Bayesian
- By Anonymous User on 01-25-22
By: Aubrey Clayton
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The Library
- A Fragile History
- By: Andrew Pettegree, Arthur der Weduwen
- Narrated by: Sean Barrett
- Length: 15 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes, or filled with bean bags and children’s drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied, and stuffed full of incident.
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Stays on point
- By Alex on 04-29-23
By: Andrew Pettegree, and others
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Texas Rising
- The Epic History of the Lone Star Republic and the Rise of the Texas Rangers, 1836-1846
- By: Stephen L. Moore
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The official nonfiction companion to the History Channel dramatic series Texas Rising (produced by the same team that made the record-breaking Hatfields and McCoys): a thrilling new narrative history of the Texas Revolution and the rise of the legendary Texas Rangers who patrolled the violent western frontier.
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Who chooses these bad narrators?
- By Amazon Customer on 02-07-18
By: Stephen L. Moore
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The Rest Is History
- From Ancient Rome to Ronald Reagan—History's Most Curious Questions, Answered
- By: Goalhanger Podcasts Ltd
- Narrated by: Tom Holland, Dominic Sandbrook
- Length: 11 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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This entertaining companion to the massively popular history podcast tackles everything from Alexander the Great to Agatha Christie, the Wars of the Roses to Watergate—with a unique blend of wit, wisdom, and good old-fashioned banter. Featuring an introduction from podcast hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, this book cleverly demonstrates that the past—from modern to ancient and every time in between—is both closer to us than we might realize and bafflingly strange, all at once.
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History is fun!
- By Brent Orrell on 03-10-24
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Hammerhead Six
- How Green Berets Waged an Unconventional War Against the Taliban to Win in Afghanistan's Deadly Pech Valley
- By: Ronald Fry, Tad Tuleja - contributor
- Narrated by: Ronald Fry
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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In 2003, the Special Forces soldiers entered an area later called "the most dangerous place in Afghanistan". Here, where the line between civilians and armed zealots was indistinct, they illustrated the Afghan proverb "I destroy my enemy by making him my friend." Fry recounts how they were seen as welcome guests rather than invaders. Soon after their deployment ended, the Pech Valley reverted to turmoil. Their success was never replicated.
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A compelling read from start to finish
- By Gregory on 03-05-16
By: Ronald Fry, and others
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Decade of Disunion
- How Massachusetts and South Carolina Led the Way to Civil War, 1849-1861
- By: Robert W. Merry
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 16 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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The Mexican War brought vast new territories to the United States, which precipitated a growing crisis over slavery. The new territories seemed unsuitable for the type of agriculture that depended on slave labor, but they lay south of the line where slavery was permitted by the 1820 Missouri Compromise. The subject of expanding slavery to the new territories became a flash point between North and South.
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Very good overview of the period
- By Mike From Mesa on 09-24-24
By: Robert W. Merry
What listeners say about American Civil Wars
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- William Jordan
- 11-14-24
Truly Continental in Scope
This is your chance to find out what you don’t know about the history of Canada and Mexico, as well as the U.S., during this period.
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- Tascha F.
- 07-04-24
Provides a fascinating complex understanding of the time period
Alan Taylor is a writer who excels at contextualizing the complexity of history by creating a sort of ancestral snapshot of each person and event and placing them on a family tree, showing both their relationships to one another and to their time. This approach increases readers’ abilities to build those understandings on their own in other readings, about other times. That’s cool. In this book, he upends a more static understanding of North and South and provides a kaleidoscope of complexity with regards to individuals and social groups from regions both within and outside of our borders.
In this book, Alan Taylor displays his unique brilliance at making legible the complex interplay of extremely diverse international, national, and factional agendas, political aspirations, people’s attachment to their political and social worldviews, economic aspirations, their bluster, their denial, and their honest – if not always successful – efforts. Quoting from a mind-bogglingly large reading list of academic sources, newspapers, diaries, and other historical documents, he brings people back to life in such a way that you could mentally animate what role these historical figures would play today on the world stage or even in a more intimate setting of your own office politics. He makes the complexity and uncertainty decipherable so that we can think about it, argue about it, and explore it just as we would events with which we are familiar today.
A true love of history and our understanding of humanity at present are not served by infatuation with imagined, polished heroes but by complex accounts and considerations of character, influences, dreams, successes, and failures that reveal how these elements are the common denominators in all lives and across all times. Taylor does this superbly for figures North, South, enslaved, free, freed Blacks, embittered whites, Mexican, Spanish, Canadian, British, French, and Indigenous. He juxtaposes Maximilian’s wife, Carlota, sister of Leopold II, who placed faith in herself and in her husband to transform Mexico through better monarchy, with the far more egalitarian Benito Juárez, who ultimately subordinated the lives of the indigenous people in capitulating to a rising oligarchy of American investors who could rebuild Mexico. Both Carlota and Juarez are driven to varying degrees of madness by the results of their efforts.
We see members of the former Confederacy who rue their violent support for the perverse and cruel institution of slavery once the war is over, alongside others who will stop at nothing to bring back the old order. And we see Northerners, who in wartime decried slavery with a furious ardor, eventually languishing in their duty to their fellows after the war was over. There are warriors for justice, warriors for oppression, realists, capitulators, power brokers, and pawns. Even the best, who are not depleted of passionate intensity for doing right, must contend with an ecosystem of others’ dreams and aspirations, which all too often run afoul of the righteous. In the end, we may be judged by others and by ourselves for what we’ve wished for: either peace and fairness or war and acquisition at any price.
The book serves as a reminder to plant the right seeds and dream the right dreams…for everybody’s children. Because when the harshest frost melts away, something new will grow.
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- Brandon Marken
- 07-12-24
fascinating!
I'm a huge history nerd but whenever I've read books on the US Civil War it's always been focused entirely on the US without any discussion kd how the war affected other countries and how other countries affected the US. This is one of the most interesting books I've read in a long time.
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- Matt
- 10-17-24
This is the wrong narrator
Winton does fine with his narration... except for how he pronounces anything that starts with a W. You know that Family Guy sketch about Cool Whip? That's half this book. He should not be narrating a book that has the words "whites, whipped or Whigs" in it as much as this book.
As for Taylor, the book doesn't have a solid structure. He tells the story in order, and mentions a bunch of people for about 2 paragraphs each, only to never mention them again. It makes what should be an interesting story rather dull at times.
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