How the Word Is Passed
A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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Narrated by:
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Clint Smith
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By:
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Clint Smith
About this listen
This compelling #1 New York Times bestseller examines the legacy of slavery in America—and how both history and memory continue to shape our everyday lives.
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.
It is the story of the Monticello Plantation in Virginia, the estate where Thomas Jefferson wrote letters espousing the urgent need for liberty while enslaving more than four hundred people. It is the story of the Whitney Plantation, one of the only former plantations devoted to preserving the experience of the enslaved people whose lives and work sustained it. It is the story of Angola, a former plantation-turned-maximum-security prison in Louisiana that is filled with Black men who work across the 18,000-acre land for virtually no pay. And it is the story of Blandford Cemetery, the final resting place of tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers.
A deeply researched and transporting exploration of the legacy of slavery and its imprint on centuries of American history, How the Word Is Passed illustrates how some of our country's most essential stories are hidden in plain view—whether in places we might drive by on our way to work, holidays such as Juneteenth, or entire neighborhoods like downtown Manhattan, where the brutal history of the trade in enslaved men, women, and children has been deeply imprinted.
Informed by scholarship and brought to life by the story of people living today, Smith's debut work of nonfiction is a landmark of reflection and insight that offers a new understanding of the hopeful role that memory and history can play in making sense of our country and how it has come to be.
Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
Winner of the Stowe Prize
Winner of 2022 Hillman Prize for Book Journalism
PEN America 2022 John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction Finalist
A New York Times 10 Best Books of 2021
A Time 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2021
Named a Best Book of 2021 by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Economist, Smithsonian, Esquire, Entropy, The Christian Science Monitor, WBEZ's Nerdette Podcast, TeenVogue, GoodReads, SheReads, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Fathom Magazine, the New York Public Library, and the Chicago Public Library
One of GQ’s 50 Best Books of Literary Journalism of the 21st Century
Longlisted for the National Book Award Los Angeles Times, Best Nonfiction Gift
One of President Obama's Favorite Books of 2021
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Critic reviews
"Raises questions that we must all address, without recourse to wishful thinking or the collective ignorance and willful denial that fuels white supremacy.” —Martha Anne Toll, The Washington Post
"The detail and depth of the storytelling is vivid and visceral, making history present and real. Equally commendable is the care and compassion shown to those Smith interviews — whether tour guides or fellow visitors in these many spaces. Due to his care as an interviewer, the responses Smith elicits are resonant and powerful. . . . Smith deftly connects the past, hiding in plain sight, with today's lingering effects.”—Hope Wabuke, NPR
"What [Smith] does, quite successfully, is show that we whitewash our history at our own risk. That history is literally still here, taking up acres of space, memorializing the past, and teaching us how we got to be where we are, and the way we are. Bury it now and it will only come calling later." —USA Today
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Enlightening
- By D C on 08-24-20
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Lose Your Mother
- A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
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- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
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In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade by recounting a journey she took along a slave route in Ghana. Following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, she reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
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Outstanding!!
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By: Saidiya Hartman
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The Fire This Time
- A New Generation Speaks About Race
- By: Jesmyn Ward
- Narrated by: Cherise Boothe, Michael Early, Kevin R. Free, and others
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National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping-off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time.
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Delusion shattering
- By Matthew A. Burnett on 06-12-20
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The Address Book
- What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power
- By: Deirdre Mask
- Narrated by: Janina Edwards
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An exuberant and insightful work of popular history of how streets got their names, houses their numbers, and what it reveals about class, race, power, and identity. When most people think about street addresses, if they think of them at all, it is in their capacity to ensure that the postman can deliver mail or a traveler won’t get lost. But street addresses were not invented to help you find your way; they were created to find you. In many parts of the world, your address can reveal your race and class.
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Simply OK
- By CJFLA on 07-18-20
By: Deirdre Mask
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The Accommodation
- The Politics of Race in an American City
- By: Jim Schutze, John Wiley Price
- Narrated by: Mike Rhyner, John Wiley Price
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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The powerful, long-repressed classic of Dallas history that examines the violent and suppressed history of race and racism in the city. Written by longtime Dallas political journalist Jim Schutze, formerly of the Dallas Times Herald and Dallas Observer and currently columnist at D Magazine, The Accommodation follows the story of Dallas from slavery through the civil rights movement and the city’s desegregation efforts in the 1950s and ‘60s.
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Floored
- By Anthony on 09-16-22
By: Jim Schutze, and others
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Four Hundred Souls
- A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
- By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, Keisha N. Blain - editor
- Narrated by: full cast
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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History never taught
- By Scott P ODonnell on 02-16-21
By: Ibram X. Kendi - editor, and others
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Life of a Klansman
- A Family History in White Supremacy
- By: Edward Ball
- Narrated by: Edward Ball
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
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Life of a Klansman tells the story of a warrior in the Ku Klux Klan, a carpenter in Louisiana who took up the cause of fanatical racism during the years after the Civil War. Edward Ball, a descendant of the Klansman, paints a portrait of his family’s anti-Black militant that is part history, part memoir rich in personal detail.
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Thought Provoking, But . . .
- By William G. Stuart on 09-01-20
By: Edward Ball
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In Search of Our Roots
- How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 16 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Performance
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Story
Most African Americans, in tracing their family’s past, encounter a series of daunting obstacles. Slavery was a brutally efficient nullifier of identity, willfully denying Black men and women even their names. Here, scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., backed by an elite team of geneticists and researchers, takes 19 extraordinary African Americans on a once unimaginable journey, tracing family sagas through US history and back to Africa.
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Amazing
- By Placeholder on 04-17-19
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America's Prophet
- Moses and the American Story
- By: Bruce Feiler
- Narrated by: Bruce Feiler
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The exodus story is America's story. Moses is our real founding father. In this groundbreaking book, New York Times best-selling author Bruce Feiler travels through touchstones in American history and traces the biblical prophet's influence from the Mayflower through today.
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Another great book
- By TR on 11-06-09
By: Bruce Feiler
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Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All
- A New Zealand Story
- By: Christina Thompson
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 8 hrs and 29 mins
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Come on Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All is the story of the cultural collision between Westerners and the Maoris of New Zealand, told partly as a history of the complex and bloody period of contact between Europeans and the Maoris in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and partly as the story of Christina Thompson's marriage to a Maori man.
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a beautiful story
- By Pumpkin99 on 12-24-22
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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
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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.
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Should be required reading in all schools.
- By Anonymous User on 12-31-21
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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
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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.
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Comprehensive and Cutting
- By Thomas Ray on 12-30-21
By: Nikole Hannah-Jones, and others
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Denmark Vesey's Garden
- Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
- By: Ethan J. Kytle, Blain Roberts
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.
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Timely, well-written and enlightening.
- By DG on 06-05-18
By: Ethan J. Kytle, and others
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A must read for everyone.
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What listeners say about How the Word Is Passed
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Susan L Hardy
- 03-04-23
Immense
Reading such difficult things in such an elegantly structured book and read with such a genuine understanding of the stories passed down was mesmerizing. After finishing each chapter I had to sit and stare out the window and not move nor make a sound I was so profoundly moved by the immense sadness of one of history’s biggest betrayals.
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- Jane Hunt
- 06-08-21
A Must Read
This is a beautifully written book about the ugliness of slavery in the United States and everything that has manifested because of it. Dr. Smith has made it clear that the white washing of history and the secrets it has attempted to hide are no longer going to be tolerated or accepted as the truth. Through interviews, travel and research Dr. Smith brings things into the open that need to be included in every American and World history curriculum.
From the epilogue
"I do not misunderstand the language of progress. Though I realize I do not yet have all the words to discuss a crime that is still unfolding....
The history of slavery is the history of the United States. It was not peripheral to our founding. It was central to it. It is not irrelevant to our contemporary society. It created it. It's history is in our soil, it is in our policies and it must be in our memories."
Read it. You won't be disappointed.
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- frs
- 07-07-21
Outstanding work
Having grown up in the 40’s through the 60’s in mostly the Midwest but with wintering in Florida, this was a most revealing work that peeled back the coverups of what clouded my reality. The power of financial and political control over communities and generating accepted histories is appalling. Today’s politics more than reflects this disinformation threat to democracy.
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- smileedog68
- 10-19-21
Excellent and Necessary
This book is well written and a must read. Clint Smith does an excellent job of connecting the dots for anyone wanting to better understand the importance of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade to the Economic growth of the U.S. He addresses some parts of America’s past that are hard to hear… but necessary to hear for America to move forward.
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- Lisa
- 07-26-21
Outstanding & Beautifully Told
Smith does ab outstanding job of compling stories that help us better understand the ways our American history is told, what is omitted & who decides what to tell. Thank you for this experience!
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- Amazon Customer
- 10-11-21
Honest and Holistic History
Clint Smith’s honest and holistic look at the history of slavery and racism in America from his experiences, travels, and research is both devastating and hopeful. His writing does more than tell the facts about his topic, but also illustrates the people and humanity behind it. It’s a must read and a beacon for how history should be taught.
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- Tigre Douglas
- 07-30-21
Amazing
This was amazing book all black people that care about there history and truth of there history should read or listen to this book.
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- Shantanu Sharma
- 09-03-21
Couldn’t stop once I started
This is a terrific book. Once I started, I just had to keep going until I finished. As someone who isn’t born in the US or went to school in the US, I’m always trying to understand more fully my adopted country. This book is a milestone in my pursuit. I have read several books on slavery (Empire of Necessity, The Half Has Never Been Told, etc. ) but this book is the best of the lot. I think it should be made mandatory reading in school. It will be the perfect counter to the revisionist history being taught in school.
Read it.
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- Elaine Bennett
- 08-26-21
Raw truths set in lyrical prose
In addition to being an educator and activist, Clint Smith is also a poet. This book will break your heart and fire you up, and make you feel the humid breeze of Louisiana, the hot summer sun of the South. A beautifully written and supremely important book.
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- Brittani Doakes
- 09-27-21
Needs to be the first of a series!
I may be a little partial because the author is my classmate, but this was absolutely wonderful. His attention to detail and use of imagery make me want to visit the places he went, while simultaneously feeling like I already did. I found myself nodding in agreement at times, and other times like he was reading my mind. I wish he would go to some more of the historical sites and offer more insight in more installments.
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