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American Contagions
- Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 2 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
A concise history of how American law has shaped - and been shaped by - the experience of contagion, "taking us from the smallpox outbreaks of the colonies to COVID-19.... The conclusion [Witt] arrives at is devastating" (Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times).
From yellow fever to smallpox to polio to AIDS to COVID-19, epidemics have prompted Americans to make choices and answer questions about their basic values and their laws. In five concise chapters, historian John Fabian Witt traces the legal history of epidemics, showing how infectious disease has both shaped, and been shaped by, the law. Arguing that throughout American history legal approaches to public health have been liberal for some communities and authoritarian for others, Witt shows us how history's answers to the major questions brought up by previous epidemics help shape our answers today: What is the relationship between individual liberty and the common good? What is the role of the federal government, and what is the role of the states? Will long-standing traditions of government and law give way to the social imperatives of an epidemic? Will we let the inequities of our mixed tradition continue?
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Story
Best-selling author Ted Stewart explains how the Supreme Court and its nine appointed members now stand at a crucial point in their power to hand down momentous and far-ranging decisions. Today's Court affects every major area of American life, from health care to civil rights, from abortion to marriage. This fascinating book reveals the complex history of the Court as told through seven pivotal decisions.
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Polemical, downright ridiculous at times
- By Joe Igla on 11-04-17
By: Ted Stewart
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Golden Gulag
- Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
- By: Ruth Wilson Gilmore
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Since 1980, the number of people in US prisons has increased more than 450 percent. Despite a crime rate that has been falling steadily for decades, California has led the way in this explosion, with what a state analyst called "the biggest prison building project in the history of the world". Golden Gulag provides the first detailed explanation for that buildup by looking at how political and economic forces conjoined to produce the prison boom.
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Started off great but devolved into case study
- By normal person on 10-16-21
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Eurotrash
- Why America Must Reject the Failed Ideas of a Dying Continent
- By: David Harsanyi
- Narrated by: Charles Constant
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Europe has been declining under the weight of its antiquated institutions, economic fatigue, moral anemia, and cultural surrender. Yet American politicians, technocrats, academics, and pundits argue, with increasing popularity, that Americans should look across the Atlantic for solutions to the nation’s problems, including on issues like health care, the welfare state, immigration, and a bloated bureaucracy.
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Details on many ways Europe is lacking
- By Alicia B. on 11-15-21
By: David Harsanyi
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The Nonsense Factory
- The Making and Breaking of the American Legal System
- By: Bruce Cannon Gibney
- Narrated by: Matt Kugler
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Our trial courts conduct hardly any trials, our correctional systems do not correct, and the rise of mandated arbitration has ushered in a shadowy system of privatized "justice". Meanwhile, our legislators can't even follow their own rules for making rules while the rule of law mutates into a perpetual state of emergency. The legal system is becoming an incomprehensible farce. How did this happen? In The Nonsense Factory, Bruce Cannon Gibney shows that over the past 70 years, the legal system has dangerously confused quantity with quality and might with legitimacy.
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Ruined by obvious bias
- By M. E. Blackman on 10-07-19
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Colonialism
- A Moral Reckoning
- By: Nigel Biggar
- Narrated by: Matt Bates
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet empire in 1989, many believed that we had arrived at the ‘End of History’—that the global dominance of liberal democracy had been secured forever. Now, however, with Russia rattling its sabre on the borders of Europe and China rising to challenge the post-1945 world order, the liberal West faces major threats. These threats are not only external. Especially in the Anglosphere, the ‘decolonisation’ movement corrodes the West’s self-confidence by retelling the history of European and American colonial dominance.
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Outstanding Report on one of the greatest empires ever.
- By mcasteli on 02-22-23
By: Nigel Biggar
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The Supremes' Greatest Hits, 2nd Revised & Updated Edition
- The 44 Supreme Court Cases That Most Directly Affect Your Life
- By: Michael G. Trachtman
- Narrated by: Jonathan Yen
- Length: 7 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The Supreme Court's rulings have shaped American life and justice and allowed Americans to retain basic freedoms such as privacy, free speech, and the right to a fair trial. This revised and updated edition of Michael G. Trachtman's riveting work includes 10 important cases from 2010 to 2015.
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Nice review overall.
- By "freeindeed4ever" on 02-10-20
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Fatal Invention
- How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-Create Race in the Twenty-First Century
- By: Dorothy Roberts
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 14 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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An incisive, groundbreaking book that examines how a biological concept of race is a myth that promotes inequality in a supposedly "post-racial" era. Though the Human Genome Project proved that human beings are not naturally divided by race, the emerging fields of personalized medicine, reproductive technologies, genetic genealogy, and DNA databanks are attempting to resuscitate race as a biological category written in our genes.
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everyone should read this book to understand
- By Kathleen D on 07-29-21
By: Dorothy Roberts
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The Condemnation of Blackness
- Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
- By: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
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For a very select audience
- By Andrew on 12-28-17
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These Truths
- A History of the United States
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 29 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. In riveting prose, These Truths tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them.
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Good Story but distracting sound engineering
- By MindSpiker on 11-21-18
By: Jill Lepore
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Fantasy Island
- Colonialism, Exploitation, and the Betrayal of Puerto Rico
- By: Ed Morales
- Narrated by: Sean Duffy
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In Fantasy Island, Ed Morales traces how, over the years, Puerto Rico has served as a colonial satellite, a Cold War Caribbean showcase, a dumping ground for US manufactured goods, and a corporate tax shelter. He also shows how it has become a blank canvas for mercenary experiments in disaster capitalism on the frontlines of climate change, hamstrung by internal political corruption and the US federal government's prioritization of outside financial interests.
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Gringo Narrattion
- By shakira julia on 02-08-21
By: Ed Morales
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The 1619 Project
- A New Origin Story
- By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper - editor, and others
- Narrated by: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Full Cast
- Length: 18 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The New York Times Magazine’s award-winning “1619 Project” issue reframed our understanding of American history by placing slavery and its continuing legacy at the center of our national narrative. This new book substantially expands on that work, weaving together 18 essays that explore the legacy of slavery in present-day America with 36 poems and works of fiction that illuminate key moments of oppression, struggle, and resistance.
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Comprehensive and Cutting
- By Thomas Ray on 12-30-21
By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others
What listeners say about American Contagions
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Greg King
- 01-06-22
History- very good. Political slant- too obvious
Witt does a great job bring us the history and current state of American society and the law on this subject. Near the end his personal politics becomes too obvious and that’s a shame because it takes away from the notion that the material itself might rise above the political fray and stand alone. Managing ones personal biases once again proves too difficult even for a now self professed expert.
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