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Heart of American Darkness
- Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier
- Narrated by: Shawn Compton
- Length: 15 hrs and 43 mins
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Publisher's summary
An acclaimed historian captures the true nature of imperialism in early America, demonstrating how the frontier shaped the nation.
We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startlingly original work, historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad's famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork.
Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.
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Story
The Confederate States of America was born in defense of slavery. Between Fort Sumter to Appomattox, Confederates bought and sold thousands African American men, women, and children. These transactions in humanity made the internal slave trade a cornerstone of Confederate society, a bulwark of the Rebel economy, and a central part of the experience of the Civil War for all inhabiting the American South.
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An Emancipation of the Mind
- Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of America
- By: Matthew Stewart
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders' oligarchy in the Civil War.
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Powerful revisionist history on race, racism, and the American past (and present)
- By James H. McDonald on 07-14-24
By: Matthew Stewart
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Nature's Mutiny
- How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present
- By: Philipp Blom
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 10 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Although hints of a crisis appeared as early as the 1570s, the temperature by the end of the 16th century plummeted so drastically that Mediterranean harbors were covered with ice, birds literally dropped out of the sky, and "frost fairs" were erected on a frozen Thames - with kiosks, taverns, and even brothels that become a semi-permanent part of the city. Recounting the deep legacy and far-ranging consequences of this "Little Ice Age", acclaimed historian Philipp Blom reveals how the European landscape had subtly, but ineradicably, changed by the mid-17th century.
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Starts On Track; End Becomes Ideological Rant
- By Danioton on 06-07-20
By: Philipp Blom
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The Fall
- Last Days of the English Republic
- By: Henry Reece
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Oliver Cromwell's death in 1658 sparked a period of unrivaled turmoil and confusion in English history. In less than two years, there were close to ten changes of government; rival armies of Englishmen faced each other across the Scottish border; and the Long Parliament was finally dissolved after two decades. Why was this period so turbulent, and why did the republic, backed by a formidable standing army, come crashing down in such spectacular fashion?
By: Henry Reece
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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 Age of Reconstruction
- How Lincoln’s New Birth of Freedom Remade the World
- By: Don H. Doyle
- Narrated by: Paul Brion
- Length: 10 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In this international history of Reconstruction, Don Doyle chronicles the world events inspired by the Civil War. Between 1865 and 1870, France withdrew from Mexico, Russia sold Alaska to the US, and Britain proclaimed the new state of Canada. British workers demanded more voting rights, Spain toppled Queen Isabella II and ended slavery in its Caribbean colonies, Cubans rose against Spanish rule, France overthrew Napoleon III, and the kingdom of Pope Pius IX fell before the Italian Risorgimento.
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Terrible reading
- By J. W. Matthews on 06-18-24
By: Don H. Doyle
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War Along the Wabash
- The Ohio Indian Confederacy’s Destruction of the U.S. Army, 1791
- By: Steven P. Locke
- Narrated by: Steven P. Locke
- Length: 15 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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On November 4, 1791, a coalition of warriors determined to set the Ohio River as a permanent boundary between tribal lands and White settlements faced an army led by Arthur St. Clair—the resulting horrific struggle ended in the greatest defeat of an American army at the hands of Native Americans. The road to the battle of the Wabash began when Arthur St. Clair was appointed to lead an army into the heart of the Ohio Indian Confederacy while building a string of fortifications along the way. He would face difficulties in recruiting, training, feeding, and arming volunteer soldiers.
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Fantastic!
- By Anonymous User on 10-12-23
By: Steven P. Locke
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The Explorers
- A New History of America in Ten Expeditions
- By: Amanda Bellows
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter, Leon Nixon
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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The archetype of the American explorer, a rugged white man, has dominated our popular culture since the late eighteenth century, when Daniel Boone’s autobiography captivated readers with tales of treacherous journeys. But our commonly held ideas about American exploration do not tell the whole story—far from it. The Explorers rediscovers a diverse group of Americans who went to the western frontier and beyond, traversing the farthest reaches of the globe and even penetrating outer space in their endeavor to find the unknown.
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Needs a different title
- By Madyson Chance on 07-06-24
By: Amanda Bellows
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Populus
- Living and Dying in Ancient Rome
- By: Guy de la Bédoyère
- Narrated by: Mark Meadows
- Length: 15 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Frenzied crowds, talking ravens, the stench of the Tiber River: life in ancient Rome was stimulating, dynamic, and often downright dangerous. The Romans relaxed and gossiped in baths, stole precious water from aqueducts, and partied and dined to excess. From the smells of fragrant cookshops and religious sacrifices to the cries of public executions and murderous electoral mobs, Guy de la Bedoyere's Populus draws on a host of historical and literary sources to transport us into the intensity of daily life at the height of ancient Rome.
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Narration is excellent!
- By Richard Curry on 08-10-24
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Dunmore's War
- The Last Conflict of America’s Colonial Era
- By: Glenn F. Williams
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Known to history as "Dunmore's War", the 1774 campaign against a Shawnee-led Indian confederacy in the Ohio Country marked the final time an American colonial militia took to the field in His Majesty's service and under royal command. Led by John Murray, the fourth Earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, a force of colonials including George Rogers Clark, Daniel Morgan, Michael Cresap, Adam Stephen, and Andrew Lewis successfully enforced the western border established by treaties in parts of present-day West Virginia and Kentucky.
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Well Done!
- By Scott Arbuckle on 02-11-20
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The Memory of ’76
- The Revolution in American History
- By: Michael D. Hattem
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 13 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans agree that their nation’s origins lie in the Revolution, but they have never agreed on what the Revolution meant. For nearly 250 years, politicians, political parties, social movements, and a diverse array of ordinary Americans have constantly reimagined the Revolution to fit the times and suit their own agendas. Michael D. Hattem reveals how conflicts over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—have influenced the most important events and tumultuous periods in the nation’s history.
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1774
- The Long Year of Revolution
- By: Mary Beth Norton
- Narrated by: Kimberly Farr
- Length: 16 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most acclaimed and original colonial historians, a groundbreaking book - the first to look at the critical "long year" of 1774 and the revolutionary change that took place from December 1773 to mid-April 1775, from the Boston Tea Party and the First Continental Congress to the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
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The US revolutionary war was baked in by 1775
- By Randall Parker on 04-18-20
By: Mary Beth Norton
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West of the Revolution
- An Uncommon History of 1776
- By: Claudio Saunt
- Narrated by: Phil Holland
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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This panoramic account of 1776 chronicles the other revolutions unfolding that year across North America, far beyond the British colonies. In 1776, Thomas Paine published Common Sense, the Continental Congress declared independence, and Washington crossed the Delaware. We are familiar with these famous moments in American history, but we know little about the extraordinary events occurring that same year far beyond the British colonies.
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Maybe better in print
- By Rick on 07-05-14
By: Claudio Saunt
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The Great River
- The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
- By: Boyce Upholt
- Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. But European settlers and American pioneers had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer. In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of human attempts to own and contain the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson's expansionist land hunger through today's era of environmental concern
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a great summation of the Great River
- By Michael H. Link on 07-27-24
By: Boyce Upholt
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No Right to an Honest Living
- The Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era
- By: Jacqueline Jones
- Narrated by: Leon Nixon
- Length: 17 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Impassioned antislavery rhetoric made antebellum Boston famous as the nation’s hub of radical abolitionism. In fact, the city was far from a beacon of equality. In No Right to an Honest Living, historian Jacqueline Jones reveals how Boston was the United States writ small—a place where the soaring rhetoric of egalitarianism was easy, but justice in the workplace was elusive. Highlighting the everyday struggles of ordinary Black workers, this book shows how injustice in the workplace prevented Boston—and the United States—from securing true equality for all.
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Informative and humbling
- By KB on 09-08-24
By: Jacqueline Jones