Seven Votes
How WWII Changed South Africa Forever
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Narrated by:
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Peter Noble
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By:
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Richard Steyn
About this listen
If a mere seven more MPs had voted with Prime Minister JBM Hertzog in favour of neutrality, South Africa's history would have been quite different. Parliament's narrow decision to go to war in 1939 led to a seismic upheaval throughout the 1940s: black people streamed in their thousands from rural areas to the cities in search of jobs; volunteers of all races answered the call to go 'up north' to fight; and opponents of the Smuts government actively hindered the war effort by attacking soldiers and committing acts of sabotage.
World War Two upended South Africa's politics, ruining attempts to forge white unity and galvanising opposition to segregation among African, Indian and coloured communities. It also sparked debates among nationalists, socialists, liberals and communists such as the country had never previously experienced.
As Richard Steyn recounts so compellingly in Seven Votes, the war's unforeseen consequence was the boost it gave to nationalisms, both Afrikaner and African, which went on to transform the country in the second half of the 20th century. The book brings to life an extraordinary cast of characters, including wartime leader Jan Smuts, DF Malan and his National Party colleagues, African nationalists from Anton Lembede and AB Xuma to Walter Sisulu and Nelson Mandela, the influential Indian activists Yusuf Dadoo and Monty Naicker and many others.
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Fascinating listen
- By Amy Neff on 12-15-22
By: Robert Gellately
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Toufah
- The Woman Who Inspired an African #MeToo Movement (Eyewitness Memoirs)
- By: Toufah Jallow, Kim Pittaway - contributor
- Narrated by: Toufah Jallow
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Encouraged by her mother to pursue her own ambitions, Toufah entered a presidential competition purportedly designed to identify the country's smart young women and support their educational and career goals. Toufah won. Yahya Jammeh, the dictator who had ruled The Gambia all of Toufah's life, styled himself as a pious yet progressive protector of women. At first he behaved in a fatherly fashion toward Toufah, but then proposed marriage, and she turned him down. On a pretext, his female cousin then lured Toufah to the palace, where he drugged and raped her.
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Powerful story. Applaud the author.
- By Fourthlake on 01-28-22
By: Toufah Jallow, and others
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Revolutionary Iran
- A History of the Islamic Republic
- By: Michael Axworthy
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 19 hrs
- Unabridged
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The Iranian Revolution of 1979 was a defining moment of the modern era. Its success unleashed a wave of Islamist fervor across the Middle East and signaled a sharp decline in the appeal of Western ideologies in the Islamic world. Michael Axworthy takes listeners through the major periods in Iranian history over the last 30 years: the overthrow of the old regime and the creation of the new one; the Iran-Iraq war; the reconstruction era following the war; the reformist wave led by Mohammed Khatami; and the present day, in which reactionaries have re-established control.
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Questionable Narration
- By Arya Pourtabatabaie on 07-17-21
By: Michael Axworthy
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The Coming of the Third Reich
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 21 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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There is no story in 20th-century history more important to understand than Hitler’s rise to power and the collapse of civilization in Nazi Germany. With The Coming of the Third Reich, Richard Evans, one of the world’s most distinguished historians, has written the definitive account for our time.
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Compelling and depressing
- By Tad Davis on 06-30-10
By: Richard J. Evans
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The Third Reich
- A History of Nazi Germany
- By: Thomas Childers
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 26 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, Thomas Childers shows how the young Hitler became passionately political and anti-Semitic as he lived on the margins of society. Fueled by outrage at the punitive terms imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty, he found his voice and drew a loyal following.
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Superb and important history
- By Tad Davis on 10-18-20
By: Thomas Childers
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Fear Itself
- The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time
- By: Ira Katznelson
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 22 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Redefining our traditional understanding of the New Deal, Fear Itself finally examines this pivotal American era through a sweeping international lens that juxtaposes a struggling democracy with enticing ideologies like Fascism and Communism. Ira Katznelson, "a towering figure in the study of American and European history" (Cornel West), boldly asserts that, during the 1930s and 1940s, American democracy was rescued yet distorted by a unified band of southern lawmakers who safeguarded racial segregation as they built a new national state to manage capitalism and assert global power.
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History in Context of Political Science Analysis
- By zsuzsanna on 08-27-15
By: Ira Katznelson
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Four Threats
- The Recurring Crises of American Democracy
- By: Suzanne Mettler, Robert C. Lieberman
- Narrated by: Andrea Gallo
- Length: 13 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Four Threats, Lieberman and Mettler explore five historical episodes when democracy in the United States was under siege: the 1790s, the Civil War, the Gilded Age, the Depression, and Watergate. These episodes risked profound, even fatal, damage to the American democratic experiment, and on occasion antidemocratic forces have prevailed. From this history, four distinct characteristics of democratic disruption emerge. Political polarization, racism and nativism, economic inequality, and excessive executive power...have threatened the survival of the republic.
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Very informative
- By Angela Fobbs on 12-31-20
By: Suzanne Mettler, and others
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Armed Struggle
- The History of the IRA
- By: Richard English
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 20 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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The IRA has been a much richer, more complexly layered, and more protean organization than is frequently recognized. It is also more open to balanced examination now - at the end of its long war in the north of Ireland - than it was even a few years ago. Richard English's brilliant audiobook offers a detailed history of the IRA, providing invaluable historical depth to our understanding of the modern-day Provisionals, the more militant wing formed in 1969 dedicated to the removal of the British Government from Northern Ireland and the reunification of Ireland.
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A comprehensive history of the IRA
- By Stefan Filipovits on 02-04-20
By: Richard English
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Cuba (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize)
- An American History
- By: Ada Ferrer
- Narrated by: Alma Cuervo, Ada Ferrer - prologue
- Length: 23 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the United States severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, where a momentous revolution had taken power three years earlier. For more than half a century, the stand-off continued—through the tenure of ten American presidents and the fifty-year rule of Fidel Castro. His death in 2016, and the retirement of his brother and successor Raúl Castro in 2021, have spurred questions about the country’s future. Spanning more than five centuries, Cuba provides us with a front-row seat as we witness the evolution of the modern nation.
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US Bash Job
- By Derek & Amber Witt on 04-14-22
By: Ada Ferrer
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Fascism
- A Warning
- By: Madeleine Albright
- Narrated by: Madeleine Albright
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the 1980s, when the Cold War ended, many, including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, believed that democracy had triumphed politically once and for all. Yet nearly 30 years later, the direction of history no longer seems certain. A repressive and destructive force has begun to reemerge on the global stage - sweeping across Europe, parts of Asia, and the United States - that to Albright, looks very much like fascism.
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Warning!
- By JAL on 04-19-18
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November 1918
- The German Revolution
- By: Robert Gerwarth
- Narrated by: Michael Page
- Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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The German Revolution of November 1918 is nowadays largely forgotten outside Germany. It is generally regarded as a failure even by those who have heard of it, a missed opportunity that paved the way for the rise of the Nazis and the catastrophe to come. Robert Gerwarth argues here that to view the German Revolution in this way is a serious misjudgment. Not only did it bring down the authoritarian monarchy of the Hohenzollern, it also brought into being the first ever German democracy in an amazingly bloodless way.
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Fresh Historical Perspective
- By Greg Fulkerson on 11-04-20
By: Robert Gerwarth
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The American Experiment
- By: James MacGregor Burns
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 88 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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James MacGregor Burns’s stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War. In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history.
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American History ABCs
- By Michael on 06-16-15
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These Truths
- A History of the United States
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 29 hrs
- Unabridged
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In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. In riveting prose, These Truths tells the story of America, beginning in 1492, to ask whether the course of events has proven the nation's founding truths or belied them.
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Good Story but distracting sound engineering
- By MindSpiker on 11-21-18
By: Jill Lepore
What listeners say about Seven Votes
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Carel
- 03-01-21
Not as good as Steyn's other work
Although very interesting and wide-ranging, at times at felt as if the author gave agency to the action of going to war, where his own facts suggest more that it just happened to occur while the war and it's consequences were also playing out.
The performer mispronounced some names that he himself pronounced correctly in Steyn's book on Smuts.
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- Paal Skjetne
- 05-09-24
A relevant reminder that choices matter
This book is a timely reminder of how good choises matter and bring glory and recognition to individuals and nations, as well as how the wrong choises push people into the abyss and render a nation a paria among the states of the world. It shows the delicate balancing act of being long term visionaries but subject to the squables of daily politics - democracy. Every now and then discontent dominates and the squabling paves the way for an autocrate who primises that given all power everything will be fixed and everyone would get back at their nemesises in the process.
Very well written, excellent narration at 1.35x playback speed.
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