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Calhoun
- American Heretic
- Narrated by: Rick Perez
- Length: 22 hrs and 1 min
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Publisher's summary
A new biography of the intellectual father of Southern secession - the man who set the scene for the Civil War, and whose political legacy still shapes America today.
John C. Calhoun is among the most notorious and enigmatic figures in American political history. First elected to Congress in 1810, Calhoun went on to serve as secretary of war and vice president. But he is perhaps most known for arguing in favor of slavery as a "positive good" and for his famous doctrine of "state interposition", which laid the groundwork for the South to secede from the Union - and arguably set the nation on course for civil war.
Calhoun has catapulted back into the public eye in recent years, as the strain of radical politics he developed has found expression once again in the tactics and extremism of the modern Far Right. In this revelatory biographical study, historian Robert Elder shows that Calhoun is crucial for understanding the political climate in which we find ourselves today. By excising him from the mainstream of American history, we have been left with a distorted understanding of our past and no way to explain our present.
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The novel and fiery thesis of Break It Up is simple: the United States has never lived up to its name - and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn't limited to the South or the 19th century. With a scholar's command and a journalist's curiosity, Kreitner takes readers on a revolutionary journey through American history, revealing the power and persistence of disunion movements in every era and region.
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Completely Partisan
- By Patrick Tobin on 11-06-22
By: Richard Kreitner
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The American Political Tradition
- And the Men Who Made it
- By: Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch - foreword
- Narrated by: Kaleo Griffith
- Length: 17 hrs and 23 mins
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The American Political Tradition is one of the most influential and widely read historical volumes of our time. First published in 1948, its elegance, passion, and iconoclastic erudition laid the groundwork for a totally new understanding of the American past. By writing a "kind of intellectual history of the assumptions behind American politics", Richard Hofstadter changed the way Americans understand the relationship between power and ideas in their national experience. Hofstadter was able to articulate, in a single work, a historical vision that inspired and shaped an entire generation.
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Founding Fathers
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- By: Captivating History
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Explore the captivating lives of the Founding Fathers. Eight captivating manuscripts in one audiobook. So if you want to learn more about the life of Founding Fathers, get this audiobook now!
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filled with inaccuracies
- By Eben on 04-13-22
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Franklin & Washington
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- Narrated by: Andrew Tell
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Today the United States is the world’s great superpower, and yet we also wrestle with the government Franklin and Washington created more than two centuries ago - the power of the executive branch, the principle of checks and balances, the electoral college - as well as the wounds of their compromise over slavery. Now, as the founding institutions appear under new stress, it is time to understand their origins through the fresh lens of Larson’s Franklin & Washington, a major addition to the literature of the founding era.
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Two together, written about at same time
- By fair & balanced on 03-28-21
By: Edward J. Larson
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Confederate Reckoning
- Power and Politics in the Civil War South
- By: Stephanie McCurry
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- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
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The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
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Good view of the confederate inner workings.
- By Amazonian on 08-10-22
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Here to rescue the reputations of our Founding Fathers from the plague of modern political correctness is The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Founding Fathers. Author and Professor Brion McClanahan shows how patriots like Franklin, Madison, and Hamilton laid the foundations of American civil liberty and had a better understanding of the problems facing us today than our current Congress.
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Highly Recommended
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A novel and brilliant look at how Abraham Lincoln mastered the art of leadership: acclaimed historian Michael J. Gerhardt, who appeared during the impeachment proceedings of President Trump, reveals how a group of five men mentored an obscure lawyer with no executive experience to become American’s greatest leader
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Interesting book
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A True History of the United States
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- By: Daniel Sjursen
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Brilliant, listenable, and raw. Maj. (ret.) Danny Sjursen, who served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and later taught history at West Point, delivers a true epic and the perfect companion to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
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The raw facts are good but the info is very bias.
- By Charlie :) on 08-13-21
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The Three Lives of James Madison
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Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician, he cofounded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning.
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Cogently organized, meticulously balanced
- By Diana Black Kennedy on 06-15-18
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Decision in Philadelphia
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- By: James Collier, Christopher Collier
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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
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What listeners say about Calhoun
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nana Landgraf
- 04-26-21
Excellent book and performance
I’m trying to give it five stars in all categories but phone not cooperating. I got this book because of review in The Economist. Otherwise never would have touched it. Dislike his ideas and his effect on US and our history. But he’s a complex man. And the reading was good too, straightforward, fitting to the subject and my tastes.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Dan Kremer
- 05-20-21
A good biography spoiled (almost)
Excellent biography, terrible narration. Inappropriate pauses, pronunciation and emphasis throughout. A computer reading would have been better.
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3 people found this helpful
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- idrissa35653
- 05-30-24
Tyranny of the Majority
A fascinating history of the godfather of the Confederacy and a staunch defender of white supremacy. You can't understand the States right movement until you grasp his ideas.
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- Robert N. Driscoll
- 03-10-21
Loved it. Thorough and I learned a great deal.
Calhoun is a tough subject to tackle because it is tempting to let the awfulness of the cause he served be the only thing that matters. I found the treatment of him complete and nuanced without obscuring or avoiding his connection to slavery. I'm glad I took the time with this. I did think the narration was a touch uneven, as though someone went back and dropped in sentences or paragraphs occasionally.
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6 people found this helpful
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- Dot
- 01-13-23
Cautionary book against modern rewriting of history
An excellent retelling of a life and works of a man who has been glorified and vilified for one stance he took and drove relentlessly at the end of his public career to the exclusion of all else that he achieved. History will repeat itself to those who seek to erase it instead of contextualizing and understanding it.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Christopher
- 03-16-21
A Complicated Figure
This is an excellent biography of Calhoun, one that offers an even-handed treatment of a very problematic historical figure. Elder casts Calhoun as neither an untouchable giant nor as a villain to be cast away; instead, he presents us with a richly complicated human picture of someone who, at his best, grew the institutions that would one day blossom into fixtures of America, and who, at his worst, represented a toxic form of white supremacy whose poisonous effects are still felt in the present day.
The narrator in this recording has a great voice, but his readings feel oddly unnatural at times, offering weird pauses and inflection points that break the rhythm of the sentence. It didn’t deter me from listening, but it was noticeable.
Overall, I’d recommend this book to anyone trying to understand a complicated figure from America’s past and the long shadow he casts on its present.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 04-15-21
Excellent book ruined by poor narration
The book is important, erudite and analytical. Unfortunately the reading by Rick Perez is very poor, strained and mechanical, communicating a lack of comprehension and appreciation of the book. Difficult to understand the choice of this reader by Audible.
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- Kindle Customer
- 07-19-21
How a nationalist became the father of secession.
How a nationalist became the intellectual father of pro-slavery secession.
Former vice-president, Secretary of War, State, and senator from South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, is one of the most curious figures in American history. Early in his career he was an ardent nationalist, desiring a stronger national government to defend against foreign influence. But he's best known for his later defense of slavery as a positive good providing much of the intellectual underpinning for Southern secessionism.
Of late he's become a bogeyman for both the left and right with both sides claiming at various times that the other side is acting like Calhoun the secessionist. On the one hand this is odd because Calhoun died in 1850, well before the Confederacy seceded. So while it's easy to fault Calhoun for his defenses of slavery, he was never, strictly speaking, a Confederate or secessionist.
Robert Elder's new extensive biography does a wonderful job of tracing Calhoun's intellectual development and transition. As mentioned, his early political thought was decidedly nationalist. America needed defending from foreign (read: European) states bent on taking advantage of the new nation and Calhoun was at the forefront of that, trying to ensure protective tariffs for American industry (north and south).
That desire to protect Americans slowly morphed into a sectional conflict between North and South as the impact of tariffs was felt very differently between the two. Wrapped up in all this was the South's reliance on chattel slavery to maintain their economic (and political) position. Elder does a fine job showing how Calhoun's focus slowly shifted from defending "America" writ large to the portion of America that he thought most embodied the Jeffersonian ideal (agrarian Southern).
Elder also helps the reader understand that while Calhoun became synonymous with firebrand defenses of slavery, he didn't start as such a firebrand. While secession and threats thereof has a deep history in the US from all corners -- Calhoun's defenses of slavery were, for most of his career, muted and in line with much of his Southern contemporaries and Founders -- that slavery was an evil and unfortunate institution that had to be accommodated to ensure a break from England and one that everyone would hope would just go away quietly.
As that attitude shifted, at least in the north, from passive opposition to slavery to the more moralistic abolitionist movement, the defenses of slavery became that much more "active" and started to describe it as a positive good for all involved rather than a tolerable evil.
What's most fascinating about Elder's biography is Calhoun's very nuanced theories of constitutional legitimacy and how to ensure the protection of (political) minority rights. Calhoun's theory of the "concurrent" majority--i.e. the only real way to check a purely majoritarian rule is by granting near-veto power to substantial interests/sections within a population. While it was marshalled primarily in defense of an odious practice by arguing that the interests of the various Southern classes called for the preservation of slavery, the fact that it has been used (at least implicitly, because nobody wants to quote Calhoun favorably), by both sides of the political spectrum either as a way (on the left) to promote identity politics or as a way (on the right) to check the numerical majority, the fact remains that, as Elder closes, we have much to learn from John C. Calhoun, and erasing him from our collective historical memories, or only remembering him as a caricature, does everyone a disservice.
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6 people found this helpful
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- steve thomas
- 04-03-21
Good Bio
Glad to find this new bio on Audible as the Coit one is outdated. After a slow start (apparently not much is known about his early life), I found this to be quite good. Calhoun began as a nationalist who supported the 2nd Bank of US, internal improvements and even tariffs. When SC politics took a hard turn against tariffs in the 1820's, Calhoun nimbly shifted gears and became pro States-rights and the foremost advocate of nullification. In the 1830's as a strong abolitionist movement emerged Calhoun led the shift from defending slavery as a necessary evil to embracing slavery as a positive good. The rest of his career was devoted to the pro-south, pro-slavery cause including his short stint as Secretary of State where he took on the British empire for it's anti-slavery tilt.
The narration is choppy and there's lots of misplaced emphasis like "war making-powers" instead of "war-making powers" but I gave it 4 stars because the narrator has a nice soothing voice which goes a long way.
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- Donald
- 06-30-23
What a biography should be!
The author revealed through this biography that Calhoun became limited by his own selfishness for the way of life he was used to, which created a bias that denied his ability to see a better way forward.
Calhoun was a brilliant politician who was passionate for his country and family, yet blinded by only seeing one path forward.
I appreciated the deep dive into who Calhoun was and how he became the man he was. There’s plenty to take away and plenty to leave in the history books as lessons to never be forgotten of selfish pursuit fails to allow us to see the whole picture of what can be a better future.
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