American Rule
How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
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Narrated by:
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MacLeod Andrews
About this listen
From writer and political analyst Jared Yates Sexton comes an eye-opening journey through American history that unearths and debunks the myths we've always told ourselves.
Recent years have brought a reckoning in America. As rampant political corruption, stark inequality, and violent bigotry have come to the fore, many have faced two vital questions: How did we get here? And how do we move forward?
An honest look at the past - and how it’s been covered up - is the only way to find the answers. Americans in power have abused and subjugated others since the nation’s very beginning, and myths of America’s unique goodness have both enabled that injustice and buried the truth for generations. In American Rule, Jared Yates Sexton blends deep research with stunning storytelling, digging into each era of growth and change that led us here - and laying bare the foundational myths at the heart of the American imagination.
Stirring, unequivocal, and impossible to pause, American Rule tells the truth about what this nation has always been - and challenges us to forge a new path.
©2020 Jared Yates Sexton (P)2020 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Sexton, a professor of creative writing at Georgia Southern University, exposes the myth of American exceptionalism in this searing account.... Sexton’s survey of American political history is taut and tart.... An unflinching and well-crafted takedown of the nationalist rhetoric that fueled Trump’s rise.”(Publishers Weekly)
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- The Conspiracy to Rewrite America’s Past
- By: Jarrett Stepman
- Narrated by: Chris Abell
- Length: 7 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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America is hopelessly divided, but more worryingly, the ideas and “mystic chords of memory” that rest at the cornerstone of our civilization and bind the generations are being severed, attacked, and forgotten. The left has set out to shatter these bonds with a war on American history - the fundamental concepts, institutions, and icons that make our country what it is. And we have failed to protect our history, allowing Hollywood, educators, and the media to rewrite the story of America. We have ignored the invaluable lessons of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.
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Culture war, not history
- By J. Pulton on 03-08-21
By: Jarrett Stepman
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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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The Light That Failed
- Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy
- By: Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 8 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Why did the West, after winning the Cold War, lose its political balance? In the early 1990s, hopes for the eastward spread of liberal democracy were high. And yet the transformation of Eastern European countries gave rise to a bitter repudiation of liberalism itself, not only there but also back in the heartland of the West. In this brilliant work of political history, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes argue that the supposed end of Communism turned out to be only the beginning of the age of the autocrat.
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Great text
- By Safronov on 05-03-21
By: Ivan Krastev, and others
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How the South Won the Civil War
- Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America
- By: Heather Cox Richardson
- Narrated by: Heather Cox Richardson
- Length: 9 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies....
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Disappointing book that wasted such potential.
- By Amazon Customer on 08-07-21
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The Age of Illusions
- How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory
- By: Andrew Bacevich
- Narrated by: Andrew Bacevich, Rob Shapiro
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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When the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Washington establishment felt it had prevailed in a world-historical struggle. Our side had won, a verdict that was both decisive and irreversible. For the world’s “indispensable nation”, its “sole superpower”, the future looked very bright. History, having brought the United States to the very summit of power and prestige, had validated American-style liberal democratic capitalism as universally applicable.
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Needs an update
- By Scott Burton on 05-24-20
By: Andrew Bacevich
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Democracy Incorporated
- Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism
- By: Sheldon S. Wolin
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Sheldon Wolin considers the unthinkable: has America unwittingly morphed into a new and strange kind of political hybrid, one where economic and state powers are conjoined and virtually unbridled? Can the nation check its descent into what the author terms "inverted totalitarianism"? Wolin portrays a country where citizens are politically uninterested and submissive - and where elites are eager to keep them that way.
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Essential listening....
- By M. Levine on 02-25-11
By: Sheldon S. Wolin
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Don't Know Much About the Civil War
- Everything You Need to Know About America's Greatest Conflict but Never Learned
- By: Kenneth C. Davis
- Narrated by: Dick Estell
- Length: 16 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Millions of Americans, bored by dull textbooks, are in the dark about the most significant event in our history. Now New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, and the key events—Emancipation and Reconstruction, Shiloh and Gettysburg, Generals Grant and Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe—and much more.
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Good Civil War book
- By Steven on 08-04-12
By: Kenneth C. Davis
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The Problem with Lincoln
- By: Thomas J. DiLorenzo
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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So many thousands of books deifying Abraham Lincoln have been published that it is nearly impossible for the average citizen to learn much of anything that is truthful about Lincoln’s presidency. You’ll learn that the real reason why Lincoln launched an invasion of his own country (he never admitted that secession was legal or legitimate) was to destroy the voluntary union of the founders and replace it with a coerced union held together by violence and threats of violence, much more like the old Soviet Union than the original American union.
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Not sure about this guy
- By Luis Renta on 07-26-20
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Tomorrow, the World
- The Birth of US Global Supremacy
- By: Stephen Wertheim
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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For most of its history, the US avoided making political and military commitments that would entangle it in European-style power politics. Then, suddenly, it conceived a new role for itself as the world’s armed superpower and never looked back. In Tomorrow, the World, Wertheim traces America’s transformation to the crucible of World War II, especially in the months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. As the Nazis conquered France, the architects of the nation’s new foreign policy came to believe that the US ought to achieve primacy in international affairs forevermore.
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Powerful punch to American dogma.
- By JLK on 06-30-21
By: Stephen Wertheim
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This America
- The Case for the Nation
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 2 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time of much despair over the future of liberal democracy, Harvard historian Jill Lepore makes a stirring case for the nation in This America. Since the end of the Cold War, Lepore writes, American historians have largely retreated from the idea of "the nation", in part because the rise of political nationalism has rendered it suspect and unpalatable. Bucking this trend, however, Lepore argues forcefully that the nation demands scrutiny. Without an honest reckoning with America's collective past, we will be at the mercy of unscrupulous demagogues....
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Important
- By Shannon Caldwell on 01-27-20
By: Jill Lepore
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Heaven on Earth
- The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism
- By: Joshua Muravchik
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in "science". Each failure to create societies of abundance or give birth to "the New Man" inspired more searching for the path to the promised land: revolution, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Arab socialism, African socialism. None worked, and some exacted a staggering human toll. Then, after two centuries of wishful thinking and bitter disappointment, socialism imploded in a fin de siecle drama of falling walls and collapsing regimes.
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A biased yet informative masterpiece
- By CodyPeacock12349 on 04-04-21
By: Joshua Muravchik
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The Case for Nationalism
- How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free
- By: Rich Lowry
- Narrated by: Roy Worley
- Length: 9 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Case for Nationalism, Lowry explains how nationalism was central to the American Project. It fueled the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution. It preserved the country during the Civil War. It led to the expansion of the American nation’s territory and power, and eventually to our invaluable contribution to creating an international system of self-governing nations.
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Truth does matter !
- By CFC on 11-06-19
By: Rich Lowry
What listeners say about American Rule
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 09-17-20
Historical truth we need to hear
I loved every chapter from our past to our present. Every American needs to listen to this book to understand how we got here and how we can rise to be the democracy we thought we were, but always failed to be.
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2 people found this helpful
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- JNS
- 05-24-24
The behind-the-scenes information on the forming of the constitution.
I have a basic knowledge of the history of the United States. The information included was the type of information they don’t mention in the history books. I had an idea of some of the things which go on, but it is good to know the specifics.
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- JTB
- 09-24-21
The inconvenient truth
The inconvenient truth that Americans need to acknowledge. I love the timeline laid out and the historical capture that brings the totality of the subject into focus.
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- Worthy W. Glover, Jr.
- 10-11-20
A Must Read for Everyone
Really opened my mind to understanding the true history of the United States. Frightening but essential reading to start us on a path towards getting better.
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- JD
- 01-17-21
Eye-opening, if a bit biased
You can hear the echoes of Trump from the first chapter and the agenda is pretty apparent, but that doesn't mean that the historically accurate letters and essays are false or made up. The narrative is a bit too clean and straight forward for a perfectly true history, but the insights are still valuable. Coming from a White American Evangelical background, the history lesson was helpful and necessary.
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- Angela Fobbs
- 08-01-21
Very informative book
everyone should read this book . it's a great overview of our history and why were in such bad shape right now as a nation . Also remember to vote in 2022 and 2024.
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- John K Danenbarger
- 12-17-21
A Must Read
Everyone I know must read this book and offer it to others urgently until real civics is again taught in school.
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- Richard
- 03-12-24
Summing up of Exceptionalism Fantasies
One of the best books to summarize Americas falsities up up to 2021. He listed the realities of America, showing our history as it actually was, without glossing over the mistakes that we have made so we create a government and society that truly serves and protects everyone.
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- Susan Marshall
- 04-28-24
absolutely excellent
more than angrifying, but essential for understanding. highly recommended listening for anyone who wants to learn more about how we ended up here.
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- Stephen
- 10-01-20
Future Required Reading
American Rule is (at the time of writing this) the latest from literary critical thinker Jared Yates Sexton.
If you, like many of us, have been thinking “how did we get here,” this book will hopefully help you understand the problematic nature of that question in and of itself. The truth, once you peel back the veneer of the American myth we have all been steeped in (in major and minor ways) our whole lives, is that we always have been.
The best part about this book and this author, is you can trust all of the fingers are pointed deliberately in all of the directions. Just read it. I also gained a significant amount of fun facts for dropping knowledge as well, so you could also consider it relevant for all future family gatherings.
Mostly just ingest and digest this book, it deserves it. You won’t be disappointed.
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1 person found this helpful