Franchise
The Golden Arches in Black America
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Narrated by:
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Machelle Williams
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By:
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Marcia Chatelain
About this listen
From civil rights to Ferguson, Franchise reveals the untold history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of black wealth in America.
Often blamed for the rising rates of obesity and diabetes among black Americans, fast food restaurants like McDonald's have long symbolized capitalism's villainous effects on our nation's most vulnerable communities. But how did fast food restaurants so thoroughly saturate black neighborhoods in the first place? In Franchise, acclaimed historian Marcia Chatelain uncovers a surprising history of cooperation among fast food companies, black capitalists, and civil rights leaders, who - in the troubled years after King's assassination - believed they found an economic answer to the problem of racial inequality. With the discourse of social welfare all but evaporated, federal programs under presidents Johnson and Nixon promoted a new vision for racial justice: that the franchising of fast food restaurants, by black citizens in their own neighborhoods, could finally improve the quality of black life. Synthesizing years of research, Franchise tells a troubling success story of an industry that blossomed the very moment a freedom movement began to whither.
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Performance
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Better suited to print than audio
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- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In A Collective Bargain, longtime labor organizer, environmental activist, and political campaigner Jane McAlevey makes the case that unions are a key institution capable of taking effective action against today’s super-rich corporate class. Since the 1930s, when unions flourished under New Deal protections, corporations have waged a stealthy and ruthless war against the labor movement. And they’ve been winning.
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Disappointing
- By Ellen on 01-26-20
By: Jane McAlevey
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Fulfillment
- Winning and Losing in One-Click America
- By: Alec MacGillis
- Narrated by: Danny Gavigan
- Length: 12 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Alec MacGillis’ Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company’s growing shadow. As MacGillis shows, Amazon’s sprawling network of delivery hubs, data centers, and corporate campuses epitomizes a land where winner and loser cities and regions are drifting steadily apart, the civic fabric is unraveling, and work has become increasingly rudimentary and isolated.
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Missing some important angles
- By D. Zimmerle on 08-19-21
By: Alec MacGillis
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Driving While Black
- African American Travel and the Road to Civil Rights
- By: Gretchen Sorin
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards, Gretchen Sorin
- Length: 9 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Gretchen Sorin recovers a forgotten history of black motorists, and recounts their creation of a parallel, unseen world of travel guides, black only hotels, and informal communications networks that kept black drivers safe. At the heart of this story is Victor and Alma Green's famous Green Book, begun in 1936, which made possible that most basic American right, the family vacation, and encouraged a new method of resisting oppression.
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Eye-opening
- By Otis on 11-22-21
By: Gretchen Sorin
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Black Titan
- A.G. Gaston and the Making of a Black American Millionaire
- By: Carol Jenkins
- Narrated by: Susan Spain
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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A.G. Gaston, the poor grandson of slaves, was born in the Deep South in 1892. Over the course of his extraordinary life, he amassed a fortune of over $130 million and a vast business empire. The story of his remarkable life is written with eloquence and grace by his niece, an Emmy¿ Award-winning journalist and her daughter, who holds degrees from Yale and Harvard.
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Black Gold = Standing Ovation
- By 2Fresh on 01-20-16
By: Carol Jenkins
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Great Society
- A New History
- By: Amity Shlaes
- Narrated by: Terence Aselford
- Length: 17 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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In Great Society, Shlaes offers a powerful companion to her legendary history of the 1930s, The Forgotten Man, and shows that in fact there was scant difference between two presidents we consider opposites: Johnson and Nixon. Just as technocratic military planning by "the Best and the Brightest" made failure in Vietnam inevitable, so planning by a team of the domestic best and brightest guaranteed fiasco at home. At once history and biography, Great Society sketches moving portraits of the characters in this transformative period.
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How have we forgotten how bad these ideas were?
- By Robert S. Allen on 02-09-20
By: Amity Shlaes
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A Nation of Nations
- A Story of America After the 1965 Immigration Law
- By: Tom Gjelten
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 12 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1950, Fairfax County, Virginia, was 90 percent white, 10 percent African American, with a little more than 100 families who were "other". Currently the African American percentage of the population is about the same, but the Anglo white population is less than 50 percent, and there are families of Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American origin living all over the county. A Nation of Nations follows the lives of a few immigrants to Fairfax County over recent decades as they gradually "Americanize".
By: Tom Gjelten
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Gotham
- A History of New York City to 1898
- By: Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 67 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. The events and people who crowd this audiobook guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America....
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THANK YOU!!!!!
- By Stephen F (SPFJR) on 09-29-18
By: Edwin G. Burrows, and others
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Drive-Thru Dreams
- A Journey Through the Heart of America's Fast-Food Kingdom
- By: Adam Chandler
- Narrated by: Adam Chandler
- Length: 6 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Most any honest person can own up to harboring at least one fast-food guilty pleasure. In Drive-Thru Dreams, Adam Chandler explores the inseparable link between fast food and American life for the past century. The dark underbelly of the industry’s largest players has long been scrutinized and gutted, characterized as impersonal, greedy, corporate, and worse. But, in unexpected ways, fast food is also deeply personal and emblematic of a larger-than-life image of America.
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Road Trip Audio!
- By Anonazon on 06-28-19
By: Adam Chandler
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Disintegration
- The Splintering of Black America
- By: Eugene Robinson
- Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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The African American population in the United States has always been seen as a single entity: a "Black America" with unified interests and needs. In his groundbreaking book Disintegration, longtime Washington Post journalist Eugene Robinson argues that, through decades of desegregation, affirmative action, and immigration, the concept of Black America has shattered.
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Written for Popular Consumption
- By Catherine S. Read on 06-03-11
By: Eugene Robinson
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The Redemption of Bobby Love
- A Story of Faith, Family, and Justice
- By: Bobby Love, Cheryl Love
- Narrated by: Harvey Reaves, Cheri VandenHeuvel
- Length: 9 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Bobby and Cheryl Love were living in Brooklyn, happily married for decades, when the FBI and NYPD appeared at their door and demanded to know from Bobby, in front of his shocked wife and children: “What is your name? No, what’s your real name?” Bobby’s thirty-eight-year secret was out. As a Black child in the Jim Crow South, Bobby found himself in legal trouble before his 14th birthday. Sparked by the desperation he felt in the face of limited options and the pull of the streets, Bobby became a master thief.
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Heart Wrenching and Heart Warming
- By ArizonaBorn on 01-01-22
By: Bobby Love, and others
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Fight Like Hell
- The Untold History of American Labor
- By: Kim Kelly
- Narrated by: Em Grosland
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America’s civil rights movement. These are only some of the heroes who propelled American labor’s relentless push for fairness and equal protection under the law.
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It is an important historical cause. Well written, well performed.
- By Amazon Customer on 06-18-24
By: Kim Kelly
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On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. The Burning will recreate the town of Greenwood at the height of its prosperity, explore the currents of hatred, racism, and mistrust between its black residents and neighboring Tulsa's white population, narrate events leading up to and including Greenwood's annihilation, and document the subsequent silence that surrounded the tragedy.
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Hard to listen to, but a must read.
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Good concept, but poor execution.
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Few entrepreneurs can claim to have radically changed the way we live, and Ray Kroc is one of them. His revolutions in food-service automation, franchising, shared national training, and advertising have earned him a place beside the men and women who have founded not only businesses, but entire empires. But even more interesting than Ray Kroc the business man is Ray Kroc the man. Not your typical self-made tycoon, Kroc was 52 years old when he opened his first franchise.
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What listeners say about Franchise
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- JS
- 03-19-20
Outstanding and innovative approach to understanding race, capitalism, and politics
I’m blown away by this book. I will assign this in a college course I plan to offer on 20C African American history!
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2 people found this helpful
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- Mitzy
- 03-29-20
Microcosms are interesting
I loved the use of franchises to examine how Capitalism has (and hasn't because it can't) helped Black Americans. I wish the performer of Warmth of Other Suns had done this book though, it can feel lectureish despite the colorful anecdotes.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 03-10-22
Civil rights relation to economic development
This book mostly tells the broad story of civil rights movement (from reconstruction to present day). It threads in stories and assumptions about how these events impacted policies within McDonald's franchises. the narrator voice is extremely soothing. They are pretty good about noting when they share non factual or unverifiable elements.
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- Emma Goldman
- 07-29-21
Outstanding
Like with most social problems, a look beneath the surface reveals historical complexities beyond what most of us can imagine. If you care about social justice and vibrant communities, this book is a must read.
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- Chumnley
- 08-23-21
Illuminating
I will echo what the other positive reviewers have already said. Sadly I learned just how common a theme of police brutality-neighborhood rioting-public “outrage”- Washington hand wringing followed by zero action-repeat ad nauseam has been for over a century. I find criticisms of the audio book reader useless but in this case I will warn that she sometimes lacks the requisite voice inflection associated with a paragraph or section break allowing the listener the subtle content digestion they serve. So insert hard returns in your mind as needed.
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- Steve
- 06-29-23
A must read for business historians
This book contains a lot of good information and historical knowledge especially for those of us who were not there. One caveat for a person like myself who works in the franchise business, is that this book does not seem to be written/read in The Voice of the franchisee, franchisor or their employees but from The view of a social commentarian.
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- MJL
- 08-31-22
compelling listening a
learned a ton about fast food's relationship to the Black community in the US. So good. Helps give context to a lot of snippers of BIPOC history that I didn't know enough about.
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- Rahman Harper
- 06-08-24
Remarkable
Outstanding research and the story was laid out very well. A must read for anyone trying to understand America’s current food landscape.
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- Keith
- 01-13-20
Window into Black Capitalism
Chatelain uses McDonald's as a way to encapsulate and interrogate capitalism's false promises. Focusing mostly on African American franchise ownership, she also addresses issues relating to marketing, community outreach, health, and food justice. A contemporary and far more accessible take on Manning Marable's How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (which she paraphrases at one point), Chatelain brings statistics to life by applying them to clear and specific examples. The book makes a number of important arguments and is a great entry point for discussions about class, identity, entrepreneurship, and the function of government.
There are a few drawbacks. Most notably, the book is an awkward hybrid of scholarly and popular history. Chatelain makes a number of broad claims under the assumption that they'll go unchallenged by a reader, reflecting the bubble of academia. At other moments she's over-explaining historical events as if the intended reader is completely uninitiated in everything ranging from Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers. The first chapter is clumsily written and conceived, rife with problematic generalizations about race and class. The subsequent chapters are much stronger and more nuanced.
The saving grace for this audiobook is a remarkably strong performance by its narrator, Machelle Williams. Her delivery is unaffected and casual yet confident, making a book heavy with statistics and dates seem like having a friendly conversation.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Kevin McQueeney
- 01-29-20
Engaging History
An engaging and informative look at how and why McDonalds and fast food franchises in general proliferated in Black neighborhoods, and the negative consequences. Dr. Chatelain uses McDonalds as a lens to examine civil rights; Black capitalism; and the role of federal policies in contributing to exploitive capitalism and inequality. She creates a rich narrative, populated with individual stories, that is entertaining and insightful. You’ll learn about the creation of the concept of the franchise, Ray Kroc’s role in creating a fast food empire, discrimination against Black franchisees, and the dangers of creating a system in which places like McDonalds fill the void of missing government programs. A wonderfully crafted work, and also well narrated.
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2 people found this helpful