The Ideas That Made America
A Brief History
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Narrated by:
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Karen White
About this listen
Long before the United States was a nation, it was a set of ideas, projected onto the New World by European explorers with centuries of belief and thought in tow. From this foundation of expectation and experience, America and American thought grew in turn, enriched by the bounties of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of liberty and individuality, the tenets of religion, and the doctrines of republicanism and democracy. Crucial to this development were the thinkers who nurtured it, from Thomas Jefferson to Ralph Waldo Emerson, W. E. B. DuBois to Jane Addams, and Betty Friedan to Richard Rorty. The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History traces how Americans have addressed the issues and events of their time and place, whether the Civil War, the Great Depression, or the culture wars of today.
Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism. In engaging and accessible prose, this introduction to American thought considers how notions about freedom and belonging, the market and morality - and even truth - have commanded generations of Americans and been the cause of fierce debate.
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Ryszard Legutko lived and suffered under communism for decades - and he fought with the Polish anti-communist movement to abolish it. Having lived for two decades under a liberal democracy, however, he has discovered that these two political systems have a lot more in common than one might think. They both stem from the same historical roots in early modernity, and accept similar presuppositions about history, society, religion, politics, culture, and human nature.
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Important book on political philosophy
- By Wayne on 08-02-19
By: Ryszard Legutko, and others
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In Defense of History
- By: Richard J. Evans
- Narrated by: Julian Elfer
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Richard J. Evans shows us how historians manage to extract meaning from the recalcitrant past. To materials that are frustratingly meager, or overwhelmingly profuse, they bring an array of tools that range from agreed-upon rules of documentation to the critical application of social and economic theory, all employed with the aim of reconstructing a verifiable, usable past. Evans defends this commitment to historical knowledge from the attacks of postmodernist critics who deny the possibility of achieving any kind of certain knowledge about the past.
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Enlightening
- By David A on 07-03-18
By: Richard J. Evans
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Age of Anger
- A History of the Present
- By: Pankaj Mishra
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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How can we explain the origins of the great wave of paranoid hatreds that seem inescapable in our close-knit world - from American shooters and ISIS to Donald Trump, from a rise in vengeful nationalism to racism and misogyny on social media? In Age of Anger, Pankaj Mishra answers our bewilderment by casting his gaze back to the 18th century before leading us to the present.
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Disappointing
- By AR on 04-28-17
By: Pankaj Mishra
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The Year of Our Lord 1943
- Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis
- By: Alan Jacobs
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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By early 1943, it had become increasingly clear the Allies would win the Second World War. Christian intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic thought the soon-to-be-victorious nations were not culturally or morally prepared for their success. These Christian intellectuals - Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden, and Simone Weil, among others - sought both to articulate a sober and reflective critique of their own culture and to outline a plan for the moral and spiritual regeneration of their countries in the post-war world.
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The Audible is a Train Wreck
- By John on 09-04-18
By: Alan Jacobs
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Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
- By: Richard Hofstadter
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 16 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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This book throws light on many features of the American character. Its concern is not merely to portray the scorners of intellect in American life, but to say something about what the intellectual is, and can be, as a force in a democratic society.
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Still Current, Without Opening Recent Wounds
- By wbiro on 11-09-17
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The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
- By: Mark A. Noll
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman
- Length: 7 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Although Christian believers agreed with one another that the Bible was authoritative and that it should be interpreted through commonsense principles, there was rampant disagreement about what Scripture taught about slavery. Furthermore, most Americans continued to believe that God ruled over the affairs of people and nations, but they were radically divided in their interpretations of what God was doing in and through the war.
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Nice addition to History of U.S. Religious Culture
- By Lisa Larges on 06-04-12
By: Mark A. Noll
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A Thousand Small Sanities
- The Moral Adventure of Liberalism
- By: Adam Gopnik
- Narrated by: Adam Gopnik
- Length: 7 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights. It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history.
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Erudite and entertaining!
- By D. A. Vail on 05-20-19
By: Adam Gopnik
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Liberal Fascism
- The Secret History of the American Left
- By: Jonah Goldberg
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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"Fascists", "Brownshirts", "jackbooted stormtroopers" - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst?
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Great book
- By Mark on 05-10-08
By: Jonah Goldberg
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An African American and Latinx History of the United States
- By: Paul Ortiz
- Narrated by: J. D. Jackson
- Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning more than 200 years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history arguing that the "Global South" was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Ortiz challenges the notion of westward progress, and shows how placing African American, Latinx, and Indigenous voices unapologetically front and center transforms American history into the story of the working class organizing against imperialism.
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I had to return
- By Andrew Alvarez on 05-19-20
By: Paul Ortiz
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Democracy Matters
- Winning the Fight Against Imperialism
- By: Cornel West
- Narrated by: Cornel West
- Length: 7 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Democracy Matters is Cornel West's bold and powerful critique of the troubling deterioration of democracy in America in this threatening post-9/11 age of terrorist rage and imperial overreach, and an inspiring call for a resurgence of the deep democratic tradition in our country, which has waged war on the forces of imperialist corruption throughout our history.
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Well written, a refreshing voice of inspiration
- By Gabriel on 07-06-05
By: Cornel West
What listeners say about The Ideas That Made America
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Carl A. Gallozzi
- 05-02-21
Listenable Survey Course of American Ideas
The Ideas that made America
…A Brief History
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
For those of us of a certain age – we might fondly remember “Survey Courses” in College. These courses provided a high-level overview of the subject with a basic understanding and a ‘map’ for further reflection and study.
Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen provides just such a Survey Course” on the basic ideas that ‘made America’.
Well written very interesting and worthwhile.
Ratner-Rosenhagen provides some context concerning when these ideas were initially documented, what the ideas represented and what intellectual conversation followed.
From a high enough level of abstraction, you can read these as almost a ‘geographic map’ of rivers of ideas some of which flow into one another – some die out – all have impacted American Intellectual Conversation.
Well written – readable- thought provoking.
Should be of interest to those who read/study American History.
Carl Gallozzi
Cgallozzi@comcast.net
Selected Highlights:
• She gives credit to the Indigenous Americans – where there was no written tradition – with the American Indian Tribes having an estimated 1000 different languages and an oral tradition. Nevertheless Ratner-Rosenhagen recognizes these people, tribes and languages as pre-existing the American Experiment.
• During the Revolutionary Era – she discussion Thomas Paine “Common Sense” and the writings of Ben Franklin among others.
• Later in an interesting thought – Ratner-Rosenhagen documents that within one month in 1859 – John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry Raid occurred and Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of the Species” were published. The concepts of Race and Evolution were brought into focus.
• During the 1800’s the writing of Cotton Mather, William James and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the emerging line-of-progressive-thinking – including Emerson’s essay of Self-Reliance.
• John Dewey – documented as an intellectual force – University of Chicago – and the ‘Great Books’ program Mentioned.
• During the 1930’s as an alternative to F.D.R’s “New Deal” – the influence of both Huey Long and Father Charles Coughlin are mentioned as alternatives.
• During the 1960’s – beginning with the Free Speech Movement – new models of thought were developed. Milestone works included Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and Martin Luther King’s “Letters from a Birmingham Jail”.
• 1970’s “mentions” – include Thomas Kuhn “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” – which led to a [French Inspired] Post-Modernist thought model. There is no objective truth and etc.
• Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. observes ..”The Disuniting of America” – where he recognizes ‘riffs in Academia’…where ‘oppressed’ (?) groups form group identity – 1968 raised Black consciousness; 1970 raised Women’s consciousness.
• One background here is that during this time period the dialogue involved the debate between self-interest and any social obligation that the individual had (might have had).
• The 1980’s were the ‘Me’ Decade – see Tom Wolfe “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and Christopher Lasch “The Culture of Narcissism”.
• In academia this led to ‘fault lines within fault lines’ and the rise of Intersectionality as an idea: Class; Race; Ethnicity; Gender; Sex; and Religion as examples.
• [THE END]
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