Closer to Freedom
Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $13.99
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
-
Narrated by:
-
Diana Blue
About this listen
Recent scholarship has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition.
She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts.
The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.
©2004 The University of North Carolina Press (P)2021 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
-
One Person, No Vote
- How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
- By: Carol Anderson
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her New York Times best seller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.
-
-
Enlightening!
- By Arturo Zendejas on 10-22-18
By: Carol Anderson
-
Freedom Dreams
- The Black Radical Imagination
- By: Robin D.G. Kelley, Aja Monet - foreword
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve.
-
-
Full of past and future freedom dreams
- By Ambre Nulph on 02-12-23
By: Robin D.G. Kelley, and others
-
At the Dark End of the Street
- Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
- By: Danielle L. McGuire
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
-
-
Difficult topic, trigger warnings apply
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-22
-
All That She Carried
- The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.
-
-
An Astonishing Feat of Scholarship, Imagination and Empathy
- By Cin on 06-30-21
By: Tiya Miles
-
How the Word Is Passed
- A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
- By: Clint Smith
- Narrated by: Clint Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
-
-
Sincerely grateful read
- By Kelvin Dixon on 06-08-21
By: Clint Smith
-
They Were Her Property
- White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
- By: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African-American history, this audiobook makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market.
-
-
Women ARE just like men
- By Mary on 08-22-19
-
One Person, No Vote
- How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
- By: Carol Anderson
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In her New York Times best seller White Rage, Carol Anderson laid bare an insidious history of policies that have systematically impeded black progress in America, from 1865 to our combustible present. With One Person, No Vote, she chronicles a related history: the rollbacks to African American participation in the vote since the 2013 Supreme Court decision that eviscerated the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Known as the Shelby ruling, this decision effectively allowed districts with a demonstrated history of racial discrimination to change voting requirements without approval from the Department of Justice.
-
-
Enlightening!
- By Arturo Zendejas on 10-22-18
By: Carol Anderson
-
Freedom Dreams
- The Black Radical Imagination
- By: Robin D.G. Kelley, Aja Monet - foreword
- Narrated by: JD Jackson
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published in 2002, Freedom Dreams is a staple in the study of the Black radical tradition. Unearthing the thrilling history of grassroots movements and renegade intellectuals and artists, Kelley recovers the dreams of the future worlds Black radicals struggled to achieve.
-
-
Full of past and future freedom dreams
- By Ambre Nulph on 02-12-23
By: Robin D.G. Kelley, and others
-
At the Dark End of the Street
- Black Women, Rape, and Resistance - A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power
- By: Danielle L. McGuire
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this groundbreaking and important book, Danielle McGuire writes about the rape in 1944 of a 24-year-old mother and sharecropper, Recy Taylor, who strolled toward home after an evening of singing and praying at the Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Seven white men, armed with knives and shotguns, ordered the young woman into their green Chevrolet, raped her, and left her for dead. The president of the local NAACP branch office sent his best investigator and organizer to Abbeville. Her name was Rosa Parks.
-
-
Difficult topic, trigger warnings apply
- By Adam Shields on 08-03-22
-
All That She Carried
- The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.
-
-
An Astonishing Feat of Scholarship, Imagination and Empathy
- By Cin on 06-30-21
By: Tiya Miles
-
How the Word Is Passed
- A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
- By: Clint Smith
- Narrated by: Clint Smith
- Length: 10 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beginning in his hometown of New Orleans, Clint Smith leads the listener on an unforgettable tour of monuments and landmarks—those that are honest about the past and those that are not—that offer an intergenerational story of how slavery has been central in shaping our nation's collective history, and ourselves.
-
-
Sincerely grateful read
- By Kelvin Dixon on 06-08-21
By: Clint Smith
-
They Were Her Property
- White Women as Slave Owners in the American South
- By: Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Bridging women's history, the history of the South, and African-American history, this audiobook makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South's slave market.
-
-
Women ARE just like men
- By Mary on 08-22-19
-
Ordinary Notes
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Christina Sharpe
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we hear them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through this book always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.
-
-
Very good…
- By lawrence fauntleroy on 10-01-23
By: Christina Sharpe
-
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive
- Early American Studies
- By: Marisa J. Fuentes
- Narrated by: Carrie Burgess
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death.
-
-
Embarrassing
- By Anonymous User on 04-27-19
-
Caste
- The Origins of Our Discontents
- By: Isabel Wilkerson
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this brilliant book, Isabel Wilkerson gives us a masterful portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beautifully written, original, and revealing, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents is an eye-opening story of people and history, and a reexamination of what lies under the surface of ordinary lives and of American life today.
-
-
Brilliant, articulate, highly listenable.
- By GM on 08-05-20
By: Isabel Wilkerson
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
Comprehensive and Cutting
- By Thomas Ray on 12-30-21
By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others
-
The Half Has Never Been Told
- Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
- By: Edward E Baptist
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.
-
-
A must read for everyone.
- By S. P. Cooper on 03-18-22
By: Edward E Baptist
-
Black Reconstruction in America
- By: W. E. B. Du Bois, David Levering Lewis
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 37 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This pioneering work was the first full-length study of the role black Americans played in the crucial period after the Civil War, when the slaves had been freed and the attempt was made to reconstruct American society. Hailed at the time, Black Reconstruction in America has justly been called a classic.
-
-
The textbook you should have had in high school.
- By Saleh on 05-06-18
By: W. E. B. Du Bois, and others
-
Four Hundred Souls
- A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
- By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, Keisha N. Blain - editor
- Narrated by: full cast
- Length: 14 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A chorus of extraordinary voices comes together to tell one of history’s great epics: the 400-year journey of African Americans from 1619 to the present - edited by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist, and Keisha N. Blain, author of Set the World on Fire.
-
-
History never taught
- By Scott P ODonnell on 02-16-21
By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, and others
-
Never Caught
- By: Erica Armstrong Dunbar
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 6 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital. In setting up his household, he took Tobias Lear, his celebrated secretary, and eight slaves, including Ona Judge, about which little has been written. As he grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't get his arms around: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Washington decided to circumvent the law.
-
-
Wonderful audiobook
- By Brad Turner on 03-07-17
-
Soul by Soul
- Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
- By: Walter Johnson
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.
-
-
Heartbreaking
- By Cathy Bown on 07-30-21
By: Walter Johnson
-
Reckoning with Slavery
- Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic
- By: Jennifer L. Morgan
- Narrated by: Angel Pean
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic.
-
-
Excellent
- By Amber Douglas on 09-22-24
-
In the Wake
- On Blackness and Being
- By: Christina Sharpe
- Narrated by: Melanie Nicholls-King
- Length: 5 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In this original and trenchant work, Christina Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the "orthography of the wake". Activating multiple registers of "wake" - the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness - Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
-
-
Necessary reading
- By Joe Wilson on 08-10-24
By: Christina Sharpe
-
The Souls of Black Folk
- By: W. E. B. Du Bois
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” writes Du Bois, in one of the most prophetic works in all of American literature. First published in 1903, this collection of 15 essays dared to describe the racism that prevailed at that time in America—and to demand an end to it. Du Bois’ writing draws on his early experiences, from teaching in the hills of Tennessee, to the death of his infant son, to his historic break with the conciliatory position of Booker T. Washington.
-
-
Essays of 'life and love and strife and failure'
- By ESK on 02-08-13
By: W. E. B. Du Bois
Related to this topic
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
-
Dreams of Africa in Alabama
- The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
- By: Sylviane A. Diouf
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.
-
-
Should be required reading in all schools.
- By Anonymous User on 12-31-21
-
All That She Carried
- The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.
-
-
An Astonishing Feat of Scholarship, Imagination and Empathy
- By Cin on 06-30-21
By: Tiya Miles
-
Sugar in the Blood
- A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire
- By: Andrea Stuart
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart's earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way, binding together ambitious White entrepreneurs and enslaved Black workers in a strangling embrace....
-
-
A sweet, historical gem
- By Adrian on 06-29-13
By: Andrea Stuart
-
African Founders
- How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
- By: David Hackett Fischer
- Narrated by: Lamarr Gulley
- Length: 35 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new distinctly American culture.
-
-
faux vocalizations
- By Porter on 08-19-22
-
Bound for Canaan
- The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement
- By: Fergus Bordewich
- Narrated by: Peter J. Fernandez
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Civil War brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition.
-
-
The Heroic Missing Piece
- By Paul Frandano on 03-03-17
By: Fergus Bordewich
-
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
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
-
Dreams of Africa in Alabama
- The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
- By: Sylviane A. Diouf
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 12 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the summer of 1860, more than 50 years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women.
-
-
Should be required reading in all schools.
- By Anonymous User on 12-31-21
-
All That She Carried
- The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake
- By: Tiya Miles
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
- Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis: the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag for her with a few items, and, soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold. Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the sack in spare, haunting language. Historian Tiya Miles carefully traces these women’s faint presence in archival records, and, where archives fall short, she turns to objects, art, and the environment to write a singular history of slavery.
-
-
An Astonishing Feat of Scholarship, Imagination and Empathy
- By Cin on 06-30-21
By: Tiya Miles
-
Sugar in the Blood
- A Family's Story of Slavery and Empire
- By: Andrea Stuart
- Narrated by: Lisa Reneé Pitts
- Length: 14 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the late 1630s, lured by the promise of the New World, Andrea Stuart's earliest known maternal ancestor, George Ashby, set sail from England to settle in Barbados. He fell into the life of a sugar plantation owner by mere chance, but by the time he harvested his first crop, a revolution was fully under way, binding together ambitious White entrepreneurs and enslaved Black workers in a strangling embrace....
-
-
A sweet, historical gem
- By Adrian on 06-29-13
By: Andrea Stuart
-
African Founders
- How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals
- By: David Hackett Fischer
- Narrated by: Lamarr Gulley
- Length: 35 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
African Founders explores the little-known history of how enslaved people from different regions of Africa interacted with colonists of European origins to create new regional cultures in the colonial United States. The Africans brought with them linguistic skills, novel techniques of animal husbandry and farming, and generations-old ethical principles, among other attributes. This startling history reveals how much our country was shaped by these African influences in its early years, producing a new distinctly American culture.
-
-
faux vocalizations
- By Porter on 08-19-22
-
Bound for Canaan
- The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement
- By: Fergus Bordewich
- Narrated by: Peter J. Fernandez
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Civil War brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition.
-
-
The Heroic Missing Piece
- By Paul Frandano on 03-03-17
By: Fergus Bordewich
-
Soul by Soul
- Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market
- By: Walter Johnson
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson transforms the statistics of this chilling trade into the human drama of traders, buyers, and slaves, negotiating sales that would alter the life of each.
-
-
Heartbreaking
- By Cathy Bown on 07-30-21
By: Walter Johnson
-
A Different Mirror
- A History of Multicultural America
- By: Ronald Takaki
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 18 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States---Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others---groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture.
-
-
All mirrors distort
- By Michael on 04-02-17
By: Ronald Takaki
-
Island on Fire
- The Revolt That Ended Slavery in the British Empire
- By: Tom Zoellner
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For five horrific weeks after Christmas in 1831, Jamaica was convulsed by an uprising of its enslaved people. What started as a peaceful labor strike quickly turned into a full-blown revolt, leaving hundreds of plantation houses in smoking ruins. By the time British troops had put down the rebels, more than a thousand Jamaicans lay dead from summary executions and extrajudicial murder. While the rebels lost their military gamble, their sacrifice accelerated the larger struggle for freedom in the British Atlantic.
-
-
Learned a lot
- By Amazon Customer on 04-10-21
By: Tom Zoellner
-
She Came to Slay
- The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman
- By: Erica Armstrong Dunbar
- Narrated by: Robin Miles, with Erica Armstrong Dunbar
- Length: 3 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Harriet Tubman is best known as one of the most famous conductors on the Underground Railroad. As a leading abolitionist, her bravery and selflessness has inspired generations in the continuing struggle for civil rights. Now, National Book Award nominee Erica Armstrong Dunbar presents a fresh take on this American icon blending traditional biography and engaging sidebars that illuminate the life of Tubman as never before.
-
-
Magnificent!
- By Maurice Wilson on 01-25-20
-
The World That Made New Orleans
- From Spanish Silver to Congo Square
- By: Ned Sublette
- Narrated by: Sean Crisden
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Offering a new perspective on the unique cultural influences of New Orleans, this entertaining history captures the soul of the city and reveals its impact on the rest of the nation. Focused on New Orleans' first century of existence, a comprehensive, chronological narrative of the political, cultural, and musical development of Louisiana's early years is presented.
-
-
great book; terrible "performance"
- By WGNYC on 11-28-17
By: Ned Sublette
-
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
- By: Frederick Douglass
- Narrated by: Walter Covell
- Length: 3 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Frederick Douglass was an American abolitionist, women's suffragist, editor, orator, author, statesman and reformer. He was called both "The Sage of Anacostia" and "The Lion of Anacostia" and is one of the most prominent figures in African-American history and United States history.
-
-
Great Book!
- By Mama C on 03-05-11
-
Master Slave Husband Wife
- An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
- By: Ilyon Woo
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Leon Nixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In 1848, a year of international democratic revolt, a young, enslaved couple, Ellen and William Craft, achieved one of the boldest feats of self-emancipation in American history. Posing as master and slave, while sustained by their love as husband and wife, they made their escape together across more than 1,000 miles, riding out in the open on steamboats, carriages, and trains that took them from bondage in Georgia to the free states of the North.
-
-
Necessary story well told!
- By Marc W Rhoades on 01-19-23
By: Ilyon Woo
-
John Brown, Abolitionist
- The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights
- By: David S. Reynolds
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 25 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
-
The story of the man who saved America from itself
- By Marc on 09-29-20
-
An Imperfect God
- George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America
- By: Henry Wiencek
- Narrated by: Rick Adamson
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Washington was born and raised among Blacks and mixed-race people; he and his wife had blood ties to the slave community. Yet as a young man he bought and sold slaves without scruple, even raffled off children to collect debts (an incident ignored by earlier biographers). Then, on the Revolutionary battlefields where he commanded both Black and White troops, Washington's attitudes began to change.
-
-
Excellent handling of one part of Wahington's life
- By buffaloboy on 05-20-04
By: Henry Wiencek
-
Master of the Mountain
- Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves
- By: Henry Wiencek
- Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek's eloquent, persuasive book - based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson's papers - opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson's world. We must, Wiencek suggests, follow the money.
-
-
Clear, Insightful & Iconclastic History
- By R.S. on 04-18-13
By: Henry Wiencek
-
A Slave No More
- Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
- By: David W. Blight
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey, Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Slave narratives are extremely rare. Of the 100 or so of these testimonies that survive, a mere handful are first-person accounts by slaves who ran away and freed themselves. Now two newly uncovered narratives, and the biographies of the men who wrote them, join that exclusive group.
-
-
A Piece Of History
- By John on 07-10-09
By: David W. Blight
-
Revolutionary Mothers
- Women in the Struggle for America's Independence
- By: Carol Berkin
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle. Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle.
-
-
Required reading for American patriots.
- By Eric on 08-09-18
By: Carol Berkin
What listeners say about Closer to Freedom
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Kitana - Jade
- 03-07-23
Robot Reader.
I would love to enjoy this book but the reader is horrible and draining. I’ll have to borrow the book and read it myself. Stopping after chapter one unfortunately.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!