Crossing the Continent 1527-1540
The First African American Explorer of the South
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Narrated by:
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Simon Prebble
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By:
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Robert Goodwin
About this listen
Drawing on contemporary accounts and long-lost records, Robert Goodwin tells the amazing story of their odyssey through the American South. Goodwin's groundbreaking research in original Spanish archives has led him to a radical new interpretation of American history---one in which an African slave named Esteban emerges as the nation's first great explorer and adventurer.
Esteban (1500 - 1539) was the first man born in Africa to die in North America about whom anything is known. The first African American with a name, he was also the first great pioneer from the Old World to explore the entirety of the American South with his three companions.
In a feat of historical research, Goodwin takes us on an incredible adventure from Africa to Europe to America, filled with physical endurance, natural calamities, cannibalism, witchcraft, miraculous shamanism, and divine intervention---challenging the traditional history of the nation's discovery and placing Esteban at the heart of our historical record.
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On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz makes an unsettling discovery. A history buff since early childhood, expensively educated at university - a history major, no less! - he's reached middle age with a third-grader's grasp of early America. In fact, he's mislaid more than a century of American history, the period separating Columbus' landing in 1492 from the arrival of English colonists at Jamestown in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between?
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Just Not For Me
- By Sara on 10-25-15
By: Tony Horwitz
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Making Haste from Babylon
- The Mayflower Pilgrims and Their World: A New History
- By: Nick Bunker
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 18 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of 1618, a blazing green star soared across the night sky over the northern hemisphere. From the Philippines to the Arctic, the comet became a sensation and a symbol, a warning of doom or a promise of salvation. Two years later, as the Pilgrims prepared to sail across the Atlantic on board the Mayflower, the atmosphere remained charged with fear and expectation. Men and women readied themselves for war, pestilence, or divine retribution. Against this background, and amid deep economic depression, the Pilgrims conceived their enterprise of exile.
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Excellent, detailed and eye-opening
- By David on 09-20-15
By: Nick Bunker
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Champlain's Dream
- By: David Hackett Fischer
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Abridged
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In this sweeping, enthralling biography, acclaimed historian David Hackett Fischer brings to life the remarkable Samuel de Champlain - soldier, spy, master mariner, explorer, cartographer, artist, and Father of New France. We remember Champlain mainly as a great explorer. On foot and by ship and canoe, he traveled through what are now six Canadian provinces and five American states. Over more than 30 years he founded, colonized, and administered French settlements in North America.
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Excellent Narration - Illuminating History
- By jmholmberg on 11-02-08
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Explorers of the Nile
- The Triumph and Tragedy of a Great Victorian Adventure
- By: Tim Jeal
- Narrated by: Clive Chafer
- Length: 14 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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From award-winning author Tim Jeal comes a vivid examination of the six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman who set out to find the source of the White Nile in the 19th century.
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Great Story Flawed
- By The Mays-Dickens Family on 05-12-12
By: Tim Jeal
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The Island at the Center of the World
- The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Russell Shorto
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.
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Incomplete history, but fun. Performance is poor.
- By Matthew on 11-27-18
By: Russell Shorto
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The First Frontier
- The Forgotten History of Struggle, Savagery, and Endurance in Early America
- By: Scott Weidensaul
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 16 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Frontier: the word carries the inevitable scent of the West. But before Custer or Lewis and Clark, before the first Conestoga wagons rumbled across the Plains, it was the East that marked the frontier - the boundary between complex Native cultures and the first colonizing Europeans.Here is the older, wilder, darker history of a time when the land between the Atlantic and the Appalachians was contested ground - when radically different societies adopted and adapted the ways of the other, while struggling for control of what all considered to be their land.
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Too PC
- By Eric on 07-24-13
By: Scott Weidensaul
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The Mayflower
- The Families, the Voyage, and the Founding of America
- By: Rebecca Fraser
- Narrated by: Kate Reading
- Length: 15 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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The voyage of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Colony is one of the seminal events in world history. But the poorly equipped group of English Puritans who ventured across the Atlantic in the early autumn of 1620 had no sense they would pass into legend. They had 80 casks of butter and two dogs but no cattle for milk, meat, or ploughing. They were ill prepared for the brutal journey and the new land that few of them could comprehend.
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I kept saying "Oh My Goodness!"
- By Midwestern on 11-29-19
By: Rebecca Fraser
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St. Patrick of Ireland
- A Biography
- By: Philip Freeman
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 6 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Ireland's patron saint has long been shrouded in legend: he drove the snakes out of Ireland; he triumphed over Druids and their super-natural powers; he used a shamrock to explain the Christian mystery of the Trinity. But his true story is more fascinating than the myths.
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A Wonderful Discription
- By L. Thibodeaux on 08-12-05
By: Philip Freeman
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King Leopold's Ghost
- A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.
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Fascinating
- By Edith on 01-20-11
By: Adam Hochschild
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One Nation, Under Gods
- A New American History
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 17 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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At the heart of the nation's spiritual history are audacious and often violent scenes. But the Puritans and the shining city on the hill give us just one way to understand the United States. Rather than recite American history from a Christian vantage point, Peter Manseau proves that what really happened is worth a close, fresh look.
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Tapestry of different pieces makes for a whole
- By Gary on 03-23-15
By: Peter Manseau
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Mayflower
- A Story of Courage, Community, and War
- By: Nathaniel Philbrick
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 12 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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From the perilous ocean crossing to the shared bounty of the first Thanksgiving, the Pilgrim settlement of New England has become enshrined as our most sacred national myth. Yet, as best-selling author Nathaniel Philbrick reveals in his spellbinding new book, the true story of the Pilgrims is much more than the well-known tale of piety and sacrifice; it is a 55-year epic that is at once tragic, heroic, exhilarating, and profound.
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Fascinating book about a little-understood time
- By John M on 02-04-07
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American Holocaust
- The Conquest of the New World
- By: David E. Stannard
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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For 400 years - from the first Spanish assaults against the Arawak people of Hispaniola in the 1490s to the US Army's massacre of Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee in the 1890s - the indigenous inhabitants of North and South America endured an unending firestorm of violence. During that time the native population of the Western Hemisphere declined by as many as 100 million people.
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Most important book I never heard of
- By Robert Bourque on 03-16-18
What listeners say about Crossing the Continent 1527-1540
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- KP
- 04-07-15
Great Listen
Great read. Easy to follow and a nice glimpse into a time long past. I couldn't wait to get back to it each time I has to take a break.
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6 people found this helpful
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- vincent jermaine linley
- 03-16-18
This was a great audio book about history unknown
loved it. it told of the great adventures to the Americas before they were what we were taught in school.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Wellsee
- 10-09-20
Revealing history of an epic 16th Century odyssey
Excellent descriptions of the world of Sub-Saharan African diaspora in Northern Africa, Seville, Florida, Culiacán and Mexico City in the early 16th Century. This interpretation of who led the ill fated Spaniards across the Continent, and then in search of Cibola, is convincingly more plausible and better substantiated than the commonly believed interpretations of Cabeza de Vaca's fanciful self-serving account. We will never know conclusively, but this book makes a good case for acknowledging who deserves the "credit" for making the journey possible. The reading performance is good, but presenters poor pronunciation of Spanish names is distracting.
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