American Radicals
How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation
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Narrated by:
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January LaVoy
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By:
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Holly Jackson
About this listen
A dynamic, timely history of 19th-century activists - free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes - and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era
"In the tradition of Howard Zinn’s people’s histories, American Radicals reveals a forgotten yet inspiring past." (Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast)
Named one of the 10 best history books of the year by Smithsonian
On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s 50th birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. They would leave behind a groundbreaking political system and a growing economy - as well as the glaring inequalities that had undermined the American experiment from its beginning. The young nation had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free?
A new network of dissent - connecting firebrands and agitators on pastoral communes, in urban mobs, and in genteel parlors across the nation - vowed to finish the revolution they claimed the founding fathers had only begun. They were men and women, black and white, fiercely devoted to causes that pitted them against mainstream America even while they fought to preserve the nation’s founding ideals: the brilliant heiress Frances Wright, whose shocking critiques of religion and the institution of marriage led to calls for her arrest; the radical Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, whose commitment to nonviolence would be tested as the conflict over slavery pushed the nation to its breaking point; the Philadelphia businessman James Forten, who presided over the first mass political protest of free African Americans; Marx Lazarus, a vegan from Alabama whose calls for sexual liberation masked a dark secret; black nationalist Martin Delany, the would-be founding father of a West African colony who secretly supported John Brown’s treasonous raid on Harpers Ferry - only to ally himself with Southern Confederates after the Civil War.
Though largely forgotten today, these figures were enormously influential in the pivotal period flanking the war, their lives and work entwined with reformers like Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Henry David Thoreau, as well as iconic leaders like Abraham Lincoln. Jackson writes them back into the story of the nation’s most formative and perilous era in all their heroism, outlandishness, and tragic shortcomings. The result is a surprising, panoramic work of narrative history, one that offers important lessons for our own time.
©2019 Holly Jackson (P)2019 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"In this electric debut, Jackson...eschews presidents and generals to construct a mesmerizing story of people who committed themselves to a vision of the United States based on 'collectivity, equality, and freedom'.... This is essential reading for anyone interested in how the U.S. became what it is today." (Publishers Weekly starred review)
"Jackson adeptly interweaves all these stories, connecting one radical thinker to another to show the sweep of progressive thought in the nineteenth century that continues to echo today. Abundantly detailing political movements and the characters who led them, this history appeals to a broad spectrum of readers." (Booklist starred review)
"Magnificent.... This incisive and well-written overview of Americans who protested wrongs in their society deserves a wide readership. Many fine academic studies have covered the subjects here, but this account, written for a general audience, is authoritative and fast-paced and vividly portrays a crucial period." (BookPage)
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Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800-1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David S. Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who gripped slavery by the throat and triggered the Civil War. When does principled resistance become anarchic brutality? How can a murderer be viewed as a heroic freedom fighter? The case of John Brown opens windows on these timely issues.
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The story of the man who saved America from itself
- By Marc on 09-29-20
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Stamped from the Beginning
- The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
- By: Ibram X. Kendi
- Narrated by: Christopher Dontrell Piper
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.
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Fabulous book, poor reader
- By EBMason on 11-15-17
By: Ibram X. Kendi
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An African American and Latinx History of the United States
- By: Paul Ortiz
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.
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I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
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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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Why They Marched
- Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
- By: Susan Ware
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
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a needed history lesson
- By Jerseycookie on 05-14-22
By: Susan Ware
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Debunking the 1619 Project
- Exposing the Plan to Divide America
- By: Mary Grabar
- Narrated by: Liisa Ivary
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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According the New York Times’ “1619 Project”, America was not founded in 1776, with a declaration of freedom and independence, but in 1619 with the introduction of African slavery into the New World. Ever since then, the “1619 Project” argues, American history has been one long sordid tale of systemic racism.
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the ultimate downplay
- By Stephen Alston on 01-09-22
By: Mary Grabar
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Give Me Liberty
- A History of America's Exceptional Idea
- By: Richard Brookhiser
- Narrated by: Tony Messano
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Nationalism is inevitable: It supplies feelings of belonging, identity, and recognition. It binds us to our neighbors and tells us who we are. But increasingly - from the United States to India, from Russia to Burma - nationalism is being invoked for unworthy ends: to disdain minorities or to support despots. As a result, nationalism has become to many a dirty word.
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Extraordinary!
- By Cynthia M. Suprenant on 12-23-19
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Freedom's Dominion
- A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
- By: Jefferson Cowie
- Narrated by: André Chapoy
- Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others. In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace.
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Very easily read and I learned a lot
- By Kev All on 02-05-23
By: Jefferson Cowie
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Kingdom of Nauvoo
- The Rise and Fall of a Religious Empire on the American Frontier
- By: Benjamin E. Park
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 9 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Compared to the Puritans, Mormons have rarely gotten their due, often treated as fringe cultists or marginalized polygamists unworthy of serious examination. In Kingdom of Nauvoo, Benjamin E. Park excavates the brief, tragic life of a lost Mormon city, demonstrating that the Mormons are essential to understanding American history writ large. Using newly accessible sources, Park re-creates the Mormons' 1839 flight from Missouri to Illinois.
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Can't get over "Nauvoo" pronunciation
- By Emily Christensen on 03-10-20
By: Benjamin E. Park
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America Aflame
- How the Civil War Created a Nation
- By: David Goldfield
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 27 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In this spellbinding new history, David Goldfield offers the first major new interpretation of the Civil War era since James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. Where past scholars have interpreted the war as a triumph of freedom, Goldfield sees it as America's greatest failure: the result of a breakdown caused by the infusion of evangelical religion into the public sphere.
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Great and indepth
- By Kindle Customer on 06-02-14
By: David Goldfield
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The Trouble with White Women
- A Counterhistory of Feminism
- By: Kyla Schuller, Brittney Cooper - foreword
- Narrated by: Christine Lakin, Mela Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, and Sheryl Sandberg are commonly celebrated as leaders of feminism. Yet they have fought for the few, not the many. As award-winning scholar Kyla Schuller argues, their White feminist politics dispossess the most marginalized to liberate themselves. In The Trouble with White Women, Schuller brings to life the 200-year counter-history of Black, Indigenous, Latina, poor, queer, and trans women pushing back against White feminists and uniting to dismantle systemic injustice.
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Reframes the past by today’s standards
- By Dianne on 02-21-23
By: Kyla Schuller, and others
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The American Experiment
- By: James MacGregor Burns
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 88 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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James MacGregor Burns’s stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War. In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history.
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American History ABCs
- By Michael on 06-16-15
What listeners say about American Radicals
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- R.S.
- 07-17-23
Enlightening overview
Enlightening and well paced overview of radical movements and persons in 19th century, including abolition, women’s rights, free love, labour, communalism and socialism.
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