American Revolutions
A Continental History, 1750-1804
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Narrated by:
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Mark Bramhall
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By:
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Alan Taylor
About this listen
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a fresh, authoritative history that recasts our thinking about America’s founding period.
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. Conflict ignited on the frontier, where settlers clamored to push west into Indian lands against British restrictions, and in the seaboard cities, where commercial elites mobilized riots and boycotts to resist British tax policies. When war erupted, patriot crowds harassed loyalists and nonpartisans into compliance with their cause. Brutal guerrilla violence flared all along the frontier, from New York to the Carolinas, fed by internal divisions as well as the clash with Britain. Taylor skillfully draws France, Spain, and native powers into a comprehensive narrative of the war that delivers the major battles, generals, and common soldiers with insight and power.
With discord smoldering in the fragile new nation through the 1780s, nationalist leaders such as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton sought to restrain unruly state democracies and consolidate power in a federal Constitution. Assuming the mantle of "we the people", the advocates of national power ratified the new frame of government. But their opponents prevailed in the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, whose vision of a Western "empire of liberty" aligned with the long-standing, expansive ambitions of frontier settlers. White settlement and black slavery spread west, setting the stage for a civil war that nearly destroyed the union created by the founders.
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Critic reviews
"An epic, landmark history that places the American Revolution on a global stage while never losing sight of the struggles and sufferings of major and minor characters…. Taylor’s range is masterful. (Jill Lepore, author of Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin)
"American Revolutions is a game changer - a sprawling, ambitious history that forever alters our understanding of the Revolutionary War era." (Elizabeth Fenn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People)
"As masterful as its author and as pluralist as its title, American Revolutions combines strong narrative drive with a kaleidoscopic array of settings and characters. In vivid prose animated by prodigious research, Taylor reveals the fight for the independence of the United States as a bloody civil war in which violence and division were the norms and clarity of purpose the exception. This is a sweeping synthesis for a new century." (Jane Kamensky, author of A Revolution in Color: The World of John Singleton Copley)
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- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Often remembered as the president who died shortly after taking office, William Henry Harrison remains misunderstood by most Americans. Before becoming the ninth president of the United States in 1841, Harrison was instrumental in shaping the early years of westward expansion. Robert M. Owens now explores that era through the lens of Harrison’s career, providing a new synthesis of his role in the political development of Indiana Territory and in shaping Indian policy in the Old Northwest.
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Title = Truth in Advertising
- By William Jenks on 06-18-19
By: Robert M. Owens
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The Scratch of a Pen
- 1763 and the Transformation of North America
- By: Colin G. Calloway
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In February, 1763, Britain, Spain, and France signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the French and Indian War. In this one document, more American territory changed hands than in any treaty before or since. As the great historian Francis Parkman wrote, "half a continent...changed hands at the scratch of a pen."
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Poor account - there are better
- By Brian on 07-18-06
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American Colonies: The Settling of North America
- Penguin History of the United States, Book 1
- By: Alan Taylor
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 21 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States series, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from millennia past through the decades of Western colonization and conquest and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast.
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Excellent ..
- By aintbuyinit on 09-03-18
By: Alan Taylor
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Liberty's Exiles
- American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
- By: Maya Jasanoff
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Maya Jasanoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her groundbreaking work Liberty's Exiles. After the American Revolution, 60,000 British loyalists fled the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other points abroad. Jasanoff traces their harrowing journeys across the globe, shedding light on their ambitions, the post-revolutionary world they encountered, and their legacies.
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Staggering in its Breadth
- By Anders P Morley on 02-21-21
By: Maya Jasanoff
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George Washington
- The Wonder of the Age
- By: John Rhodehamel
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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As editor of the award-winning Library of America collection of George Washington's writings and a curator of the great man's original papers, John Rhodehamel has established himself as an authority of our nation's preeminent founding father. Rhodehamel examines George Washington as a public figure, arguing that the man - who first achieved fame in his early twenties - is inextricably bound to his mythic status.
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Not what I expected for an unabridged book
- By David Osborne Jr. on 04-13-17
By: John Rhodehamel
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The Indian World of George Washington
- The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation
- By: Colin G. Calloway
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 23 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Colin Calloway uses the prism of George Washington's life to bring focus to the great Native leaders of his time and the tribes they represented: the Iroquois Confederacy, Lenape, Miami, Creek, Delaware; in the process, he returns them to their rightful place in the story of America's founding. The Indian World of George Washington spans decades of Native American leaders' interactions with Washington, from his early days as surveyor of Indian lands to his military career against both the French and the British to his presidency.
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A Washington hate book
- By EJ morris on 02-08-19
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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 Glorious Cause: The American Revolution: 1763-1789
- By: Robert Middlekauff
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.
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Strong History Rich With Behind The Scenes Details
- By John on 10-06-11
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The First Congress
- How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government
- By: Fergus M. Bordewich
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed - as many at the time feared it would - it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.
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Compelling
- By Jean on 03-05-18
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Lone Star
- A History of Texas and the Texans
- By: T. R. Fehrenbach
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 39 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is a must-listen history of the Lone Star State, together with an insider's look at the people, politics, and events that have shaped Texas from the beginning right up to our days. Never before has the story been told with more vitality and immediacy. Fehrenbach re-creates the Texas saga from prehistory to the Spanish and French invasions to the heyday of the cotton and cattle empires. He dramatically describes the emergence of Texas as a republic, the vote for secession before the Civil War, and the state's readmission to the Union after the War.
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Top -10
- By JNW on 03-29-18
By: T. R. Fehrenbach
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Toussaint Louverture
- A Revolutionary Life
- By: Philippe Girard
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Philippe Girard shows how Toussaint Louverture transformed himself from lowly freedman into revolutionary hero as the mastermind of the bloody slave revolt of 1791. By 1801, Louverture was governor of the colony where he had once been a slave. But his lifelong quest to be accepted as a member of the colonial elite ended in despair: he spent the last year of his life in a French prison cell. His example nevertheless inspired anticolonial and Black nationalist movements well into the 20th century.
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very powerful story
- By jim on 01-06-17
By: Philippe Girard
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Helps the dots of history to today.
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Excellent ..
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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.
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fascinating!
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Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor tells the riveting story of a war that redefined North America. In a world of double identities, slippery allegiances, and porous borders, the leaders of the American Republic and the British Empire struggled to control their own diverse peoples. Taylor’s vivid narrative of an often brutal—sometimes farcical—war reveals much about the tangled origins of the United States and Canada.
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A proper history of an obscure epoch
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The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.
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Strong History Rich With Behind The Scenes Details
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The Internal Enemy
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This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
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one of the best audiobooks I've read recently
- By D. Littman on 03-02-14
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American Republics
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Helps the dots of history to today.
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Excellent ..
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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.
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fascinating!
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A proper history of an obscure epoch
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The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.
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Strong History Rich With Behind The Scenes Details
- By John on 10-06-11
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The Internal Enemy
- Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832
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- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
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This searing story of slavery and freedom in the Chesapeake reveals the pivot in the nation’s path between the founding and civil war. Frederick Douglass recalled that slaves living along Chesapeake Bay longingly viewed sailing ships as "freedom’s swift-winged angels." In 1813 those angels appeared in the bay as British warships coming to punish the Americans for declaring war on the empire. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.
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one of the best audiobooks I've read recently
- By D. Littman on 03-02-14
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Over the last generation, historians have broadened our understanding of colonial America by adopting both a trans-Atlantic and a trans-continental perspective, examining the interplay of Europe, Africa, and the Americas through the flow of goods, people, plants, animals, capital, and ideas. In this Very Short Introduction, Alan Taylor presents an engaging overview of the best of this new scholarship.
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Eye opening narrative
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The Cause
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George Washington claimed that anyone who attempted to provide an accurate account of the war for independence would be accused of writing fiction. At the time, no one called it the “American Revolution”: Former colonists still regarded themselves as Virginians or Pennsylvanians, not Americans, while John Adams insisted that the British were the real revolutionaries, for attempting to impose radical change without their colonists’ consent. With The Cause, Ellis takes a fresh look at the events between 1773 and 1783.
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Modest history primer, wished for more substance
- By Buretto on 10-21-21
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Bloody Mohawk
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In this narrative history of the Mohawk River Valley and surrounding region from 1713 to 1794, Professor Richard Berleth charts the passage of the valley from a fast-growing agrarian region streaming with colonial traffic to a war-ravaged wasteland. The valley's diverse cultural mix of Iroquois Indians, Palatine Germans, Scots-Irish, Dutch, English, and Highland Scots played as much of a role as its unique geography in the cataclysmic events of the 1700s - the French and Indian Wars and the battles of the American Revolution.
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excellent
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The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
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To the original text of what has become a classic of American historical literature, Bernard Bailyn adds a substantial essay, "Fulfillment", as a postscript. Here he discusses the intense nationwide debate on the ratification of the Constitution, stressing the continuities between that struggle over the foundations of the national government and the original principles of the Revolution.
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Bernard Bailyn is a genius!
- By John M. Crean on 04-21-19
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Ratification
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When the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia adjourned late in the summer of 1787, the delegates returned to their states to report on the new Constitution, which had to be ratified by specially elected conventions in at least nine states. Pauline Maier recounts the dramatic events of the ensuing debate in homes, taverns, and convention halls, drawing generously on the speeches and letters of founding fathers, both familiar and forgotten, on all sides.
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History Always Repeats
- By Howard on 08-27-11
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The American Revolution: 1763-1783
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The American Revolution examines the people and events involved in the significant war by which the 13 original colonies broke away from England. The authors explain the many sources of conflict between the Americans and the British government, how each side approached the problems, and the results of the escalating violence.
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War & Peace in the United Colonies of America
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The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787
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This classic work explains the evolution of American political thought from the Declaration of Independence to the ratification of the Constitution. In so doing, it greatly illuminates the origins of the present American political system.
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This Audible book is NOT for a popular audience!
- By BigWally on 11-22-18
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The British Are Coming
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Rick Atkinson recounts the first 21 months of America’s violent war for independence. From the battles at Lexington and Concord in spring 1775 to those at Trenton and Princeton in winter 1777, American militiamen and then the ragged Continental Army take on the world’s most formidable fighting force. Full of riveting details and untold stories, The British Are Coming is a tale of heroes and knaves, of sacrifice and blunder, of redemption and profound suffering. Rick Atkinson has given stirring new life to the first act of our country’s creation drama.
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Where are the Maps?
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The American Revolution
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The Declaration of Independence is one of the most pivotal documents in Western history, along with the Magna Carta and Emancipation Proclamation. Almost 250 years after the founding fathers signed the Declaration and heralded the birth of the United States, the story of how America overthrew the British is as meaningful today as when the ink was still wet on the page. This audiobook explains the story of every major military action with comprehensive timelines for every stage of the Revolutionary War.
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Great general overview!
- By Kristian K on 02-29-20
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Thomas Jefferson's Education
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By turns entertaining and tragic, this beautifully written history reveals the origins of a great university in the dilemmas of Virginia slavery. It offers an incisive portrait of Thomas Jefferson set against a social fabric of planters in decline, enslaved Black families torn apart by sales, and a hair-trigger code of male honor. A man of “deft evasions” who was both courtly and withdrawn, Jefferson sought control of his family and state from his lofty perch at Monticello.
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Written by a hater.
- By Mrs. Mitchell on 03-31-24
By: Alan Taylor
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Power and Liberty
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- By: Gordon S. Wood
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The half century extending from the imperial crisis between Britain and its colonies in the 1760s to the early decades of the new republic of the United States was the greatest and most creative era of constitutionalism in American history, and perhaps in the world. During these decades, Americans explored and debated all aspects of politics and constitutionalism - the nature of power, liberty, representation, rights, the division of authority between different spheres of government, sovereignty, judicial authority, and written constitutions.
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Provides Context for Todays Mess
- By Tad on 07-20-24
By: Gordon S. Wood
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Decision in Philadelphia
- The Constitutional Convention of 1787
- By: James Collier, Christopher Collier
- Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Fifty-five men met in Philadelphia in 1787 to write a document that would create a country and change a world: the Constitution. Here is a remarkable rendering of that fateful time, told with humanity and humor. Decision in Philadelphia is the best popular history of the Constitutional Convention; in it, the life and times of 18th-century America not only come alive, but the very human qualities of the men who framed the document are brought provocatively into focus - casting many of the Founding Fathers in a new light.
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excellent book
- By Josh on 09-13-12
By: James Collier, and others
What listeners say about American Revolutions
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- DCM
- 10-05-18
Narrator tone a bit off
Great narrator, but his tone was often a bit negative, condescending, and/or sardonic. Think it was direction, not voice actor choice.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Andrew Q.
- 03-23-18
absolutely fascinating! Masterful storytelling
it was such a concise storytelling and easy to follow and understand the complex history
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- SF Buyer
- 05-14-23
Provocative
As a 69 year old American History major, what I found most fascinating were the quotations drawn from letters and newspaper that revealed the ambivalence, contradictions, and inconsistencies of viewpoints that a study of history based on carefully crafted documents does not. I will buy a hard copy and look forward to reading the footnotes and bibliography. Purity of thought and actions are of course myths, and ideals are aspirational.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Richard C Weston
- 05-29-22
Awesome
Great book. One of the best, most informative, thought provoking histories I have ever read.
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- Eggert Eggertsson
- 06-07-17
Very detailed and informative
What made the experience of listening to American Revolutions the most enjoyable?
It was thought-provoking to find out that Indian tribes fought for the British as they felt it was a better choice of two bad ones and also intriguing to find out that George Washington, this "holy" person in school books, hunted down and killed Indians in a Custer way. He had probably no choice at that time but it makes one wonder. The superpower of its time, Great Britain mobilized additional groups to fight for them, like freed slaves but also locals and often often it came down to pure civil war as loyalist fought against Patriots.
This book is full of fact like these, many of which I had no clue of. I guess lots of things Europeans like me no nothing of, Americans learn in school, either way this book is full of history put forward in very nice way.
What other book might you compare American Revolutions to and why?
To Try Men's Souls: A Novel of George Washington and the Fight for American Freedom is the first book in Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen trilogy about some of the same era, mostly around the declaration of independence. There is history brought to live by looking at the persons and giving them voice - based on facts or active history I believe the authors call it. American Revolutions by Alan Taylor takes on much longer period and it is full of detailed narrative, full of facts and interesting things, maybe a bit to much at times. Both these books are nevertheless great in my opinion whereas one is pure history lesson and the other is a history lesson wrapped in fact based drama.
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3 people found this helpful
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- PJC
- 08-29-19
Packed with historical insight
The book dives deep into many aspects of early American life. Good read for anyone who enjoys American history.
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- Kirk Little
- 06-01-23
Brilliantly synthesis
Taylor places the American Revolution in a broader context and enables his reader to make new connections with older knowledge.
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- Jarred King
- 04-18-18
Good book
The author writes a very in-depth history of the Americas and the world in the 1700s. Good read but due to several cherry picked facts in some topics and what feels like a left leaning take on the period. I seemed like he was trying to give sympathy to the British in a war where both sides fought brutally he highlights the colonials brutality and skins over the British. Great book though, I have listened to it a few times and probably will again.
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7 people found this helpful
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- J. Sullivan
- 05-05-19
The Revolutionary experience through a kaleidoscop
The author examines the period surrounding the American Revolution though the eyes of many actors, not just the American revolutionaries and British government, but American Loyalists, the governments and colonies of France and Spain, the enslaved, native nations, women and the working poor. An impressive work and we'll worth slogging through, although the effort is sometimes a task. The author undermines himself by a tendency to "pick sides" and snear at the oppressor or victimizer, with some actors getting a chance to be both heroes and villains depending on the side of various societal clashes Taylor supports at that point in the book. The performance is fair, but undermined by the reader's tendency to LITERALLY snear at Taylor's villains, often performing their quotes with cartoonish foppish or thuggish accents, depending on their social station or nationality. Worth a listen despite it defects.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Eric
- 12-19-24
Good book. Great narration.
I liked it very much. There is a fifteen word minimum. Good book. Great narration.
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