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Promised Land
- How the Rise of the Middle Class Transformed America, 1929-1968
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 10 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
A groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class - its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.
In Promised Land, David Stebenne “invites us to remember those decades in which both the middle class and the Democratic Party were ascendant” (The Wall Street Journal). The story begins with the pervasive income and wealth inequality of the pre-New Deal period. What followed began a great leveling. World War II brought transformative elements that also helped expand the middle class. For decades, economic policies and cultural practices strengthened the trend, and by the 1960s the middle class dictated American tastes from books to TV shows to housing to food, creating a powerful political constituency with shared interests and ideals.
The disruptive events of 1968, however, signaled the end of this expansion. The cultural clashes and political protests of that era turned a spotlight on how the policies and practices of the middle-class era had privileged white men over women, people of color, and other marginalized groups, as well as military force over diplomacy and economic growth over environmental protection. These conflicts, along with shifts in policy and economic stagnation, started shrinking that vast middle class and challenging its values, trends that continue to the present day.
Now, as the so-called “end of the middle class” dominates the news cycle and politicians talk endlessly about how to revive it, Stebenne’s vivid history of a social revolution that produced a new and influential way of life reveals the fascinating story of how it was achieved and the considerable costs incurred along the way. “Well-researched, evenhanded...this concise, lucid account offers a solid overview of mid-20th-century social history” (Publishers Weekly) and shines more than a little light on our possible future.
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In The Precipice, Noam Chomsky sheds light into the phenomenon of Trumpism, exposes the catastrophic nature and impact of Trump's policies on people, the environment, and the planet as a whole, and captures the dynamics of the brutal class warfare launched by the masters of capital to maintain and even enhance the features of a dog-eat-dog society to the unprecedented mobilization of millions of people against neoliberal capitalism, racism, and police violence.
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Of Incalculable Importance
- By Anonymous User on 12-15-21
By: Noam Chomsky, and others
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The Last President of Europe
- Emmanuel Macron's Race to Revive France and Save the World
- By: William Drozdiak
- Narrated by: Paul Hodgson
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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A revelatory examination of the global impact of Emmanuel Macron's tumultuous presidency. In The Last President of Europe, William Drozdiak tells with exclusive inside access the story of Macron's presidency and the political challenges the French leader continues to face.
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Interesting but poorly read
- By Anonymous User on 05-12-22
By: William Drozdiak
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Trumpocalypse
- Restoring American Democracy
- By: David Frum
- Narrated by: David Frum
- Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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A huge swath of Americans have put their faith in Trump, and Trump only, because they see the rest of the country building a future that doesn't have a place for them. If they would risk their lives for Trump in a pandemic, they will certainly risk the stability of American democracy. They brought the Trumpocalypse upon the country, and a post-Trumpocalypse country will have to find a way either to reconcile them to democracy - or to protect democracy from them.
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Trump More Dangerous Than the Axis of Evil
- By J.B. on 05-26-20
By: David Frum
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The Age of Entitlement
- America Since the Sixties
- By: Christopher Caldwell
- Narrated by: Christopher Caldwell
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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A major American intellectual makes the historical case that the reforms of the 1960s, reforms intended to make the nation more just and humane, instead left many Americans feeling alienated, despised, misled - and ready to put an adventurer in the White House. Christopher Caldwell has spent years studying the liberal uprising of the 1960s and its unforeseen consequences. Even the reforms that Americans love best have come with costs that are staggeringly high - in wealth, freedom, and social stability - and that have been spread unevenly among classes and generations.
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Do laudable ends justify unconstitutional means?
- By LBJ on 02-08-20
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The People vs. Democracy
- Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
- By: Yascha Mounk
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 8 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The world is in turmoil. From India to Turkey and from Poland to the United States, authoritarian populists have seized power. As a result democracy itself may now be at risk. Two core components of liberal democracy - individual rights and the popular will - are at war with each other. As the role of money in politics soared and important issues were taken out of public contestation, a system of "rights without democracy" took hold. Populists who rail against this say they want to return power to the people. But in practice they create a system of "democracy without rights."
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Not worth it
- By DailyShopper on 06-07-18
By: Yascha Mounk
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The Socialist Temptation
- By: Iain Murray
- Narrated by: James Langton
- Length: 6 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Just 30 years ago, socialism seemed utterly discredited. An economic, moral, and political failure, socialism had rightly been thrown on the ash heap of history after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Unfortunately, bad ideas never truly go away — and socialism has come back with a vengeance. A generation of young people who don’t remember the misery that socialism inflicted on Russia and Eastern Europe is embracing it all over again.
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Full Of Important Insights
- By Ralph Alderson on 12-17-20
By: Iain Murray
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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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Heaven on Earth
- The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism
- By: Joshua Muravchik
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Socialism was man's most ambitious attempt to supplant religion with a doctrine claiming to ground itself in "science". Each failure to create societies of abundance or give birth to "the New Man" inspired more searching for the path to the promised land: revolution, communes, social democracy, communism, fascism, Arab socialism, African socialism. None worked, and some exacted a staggering human toll. Then, after two centuries of wishful thinking and bitter disappointment, socialism imploded in a fin de siecle drama of falling walls and collapsing regimes.
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A biased yet informative masterpiece
- By CodyPeacock12349 on 04-04-21
By: Joshua Muravchik
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The Birth of Classical Europe
- A History from Troy to Augustine
- By: Simon Price, Peter Thonemann
- Narrated by: Don Hagen
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....
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Excellent overview of the Classical World
- By David I. Williams on 01-12-14
By: Simon Price, and others
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Audacity
- How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail
- By: Jonathan Chait
- Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain
- Length: 8 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Over the course of eight years, Barack Obama has amassed an array of outstanding achievements. His administration saved the American economy from collapse, expanded health insurance to millions who previously could not afford it, negotiated an historic nuclear deal with Iran, helped craft a groundbreaking international climate accord, reined in Wall Street, and crafted a new vision of racial progress.
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Good and balanced view of the Obama years
- By Paul on 02-01-17
By: Jonathan Chait
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U.S. History For Dummies, 4th Edition
- By: Steve Wiegand
- Narrated by: Al Kessel
- Length: 19 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States is undergoing a period of intense political and social change. From the rise of the Tea Party to social media's effect on American life and politics, this new edition fills in the gaps of this Nation's story. Award-winning political journalist and history writer Steve Wiegand guides you through the events that shaped our nation, from pre-Columbian civilizations to the 21st century. The explorers, the wars, the leaders, and the eras are all fully explored and explained, demonstrating how the past influences the future.
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Couldn’t finish it.
- By Amazon Customer on 09-12-19
By: Steve Wiegand
What listeners say about Promised Land
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-18-20
Middle Class was middle of the Road
This read gave me perspective about our contemporary condition in America. When journalists are forever referring to the middle class, they are talking about a population, which basically ended in 1968. The middle class is a group of white Americans whose mores and beliefs were shaped by the Depression and the Cold War. No wonder contemporary analysis is so off base, it’s anachronistic.
But the analysis felt as “middlebrow” as the population Stebenne writes about. His conclusions are so middling, as not to offend those on the right or left. No doubt, the middle class would be content with this book.
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