
The Age of Acrimony
How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915
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Narrated by:
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Johnny Heller
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By:
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Jon Grinspan
About this listen
Bloomsbury presents The Age of Acrimony by Jon Grinspan, read by Johnny Heller.
A penetrating, character-filled history “in the manner of David McCullough” (WSJ), revealing the deep roots of our tormented present-day politics.
Democracy was broken. Or that was what many Americans believed in the decades after the Civil War. Shaken by economic and technological disruption, they sought safety in aggressive, tribal partisanship. The results were the loudest, closest, most violent elections in U.S. history, driven by vibrant campaigns that drew our highest-ever voter turnouts. At the century’s end, reformers finally restrained this wild system, trading away participation for civility in the process. They built a calmer, cleaner democracy, but also a more distant one. Americans’ voting rates crashed and never fully recovered.
This is the origin story of the “normal” politics of the 20th century. Only by exploring where that civility and restraint came from can we understand what is happening to our democracy today.
The Age of Acrimony charts the rise and fall of 19th-century America’s unruly politics through the lives of a remarkable father-daughter dynasty. The radical congressman William “Pig Iron” Kelley and his fiery, Progressive daughter Florence Kelley led lives packed with drama, intimately tied to their nation’s politics. Through their friendships and feuds, campaigns and crusades, Will and Florie trace the narrative of a democracy in crisis. In telling the tale of what it cost to cool our republic, historian Jon Grinspan reveals our divisive political system’s enduring capacity to reinvent itself.
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Story
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 Path to Power
- The Years of Lyndon Johnson
- By: Robert A. Caro
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 40 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered.
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The Best of all Biographies
- By David C. Daggett on 12-14-13
By: Robert A. Caro
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Stalin's War
- A New History of World War II
- By: Sean McMeekin
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 24 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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World War II endures in the popular imagination as a heroic struggle between good and evil, with villainous Hitler driving its events. But Hitler was not in power when the conflict erupted in Asia. His armies did not fight in multiple theaters, his empire did not span the Eurasian continent, and he did not inherit any of the spoils of war. That central role belonged to Joseph Stalin. Drawing on ambitious new research in Soviet, European, and US archives, Stalin’s War revolutionizes our understanding of this global conflict by moving its epicenter to the east.
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Sean McMeekin Does It Again!
- By Stephen F (SPFJR) on 04-21-21
By: Sean McMeekin
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Continental Reckoning
- The American West in the Age of Expansion
- By: Elliott West
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 23 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative of the American West and its vital role in the transformation of the nation. In the 1840s, by which time the United States had expanded to the Pacific, what would become the West was home to numerous vibrant Native cultures and vague claims by other nations.
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Great Historian, Worth Listening
- By Janice on 01-19-25
By: Elliott West
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Autocracy, Inc.
- The Dictators Who Want to Run the World
- By: Anne Applebaum
- Narrated by: Anne Applebaum
- Length: 4 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are underpinned not by one dictator, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which operate across multiple regimes, from China to Russia to Iran.
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A Triumphant Work -Puts It All Together With Laser Clarity
- By Sjhoffman on 09-19-24
By: Anne Applebaum
Makes present politics so much more understandable.
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Political Insights
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You Will Learn A Lot from this book
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Presenting the history of the era through the story of the Kelley family made it both more enjoyable and memorable.
Puts our current political era in perspective
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Great Context for Our Current Period of Democracy
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I just don't know whether to feel more optimisti or less, about our future as a democracy!
Fascinating revelations
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Learned a lot
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I kept waiting for more meat on the history part, but it's mostly flowery writing about human interest stories than an analysis of the events / forces, and why they're happening.
To me it was more a Read of Acrimony, but if you want the story of some of the central characters, then it's in there. I think?
Needs more history, less anecdotes
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The book sometimes read like a biography of Will "Pig Iron" Kelley and his daughter Florence. Prehaps a deliberate choice to anchor the reader on a couple key individuals as to not get lost in all the dirty, rotten characters that plagued the Gilded Age era. I would have liked more focus on the tools that political parties leveraged to influence the public, corporations, and ultimately elections. Additionally, I hoped that Part 3 would have spent more time describing the mechanisms that pulled power out of politics and how those lessons might be applied today.
The narrator spoke too quickly for me. I had to slow it down and make frequent backtracks to hear what was happening in places. It took a few chapter for me to grasp all that was going on and then I was fully in by Part 2. His speaking style and tone was just enough of that "mid-atlantic" sound that felt fitting for the piece.
Fascinating story but spoken too quickly
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