Beginning with the birth of the nation, slavery divided and caused conflict for the United States of America, worsening during the country's early decades as the practice became more economically vital. Finally, in 1861, the American Civil War erupted after the election of President Abraham Lincoln. Never acknowledging the South’s right to secede, Lincoln and the North fought the South through four long, bloody, destructive years; much longer than anyone thought the war would last.

The audiobook covers the first stages of the war, from 1927-1937, the interlude from 1938-1945 during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, and the final and most well-known phase of the war from 1946-1949. Learn about the causes, events, and lasting effects of the Chinese Civil War and about the warfare tactics and political strategy of the Chinese Communist Party and the Nationalist Kuomintang during these integral years. This is the story about how a group of young, inexperienced Chinese revolutionaries changed the destiny of China.

Ernest Shackleton was not just a great explorer - he was also a great commander. When the chips were down, he could always be depended upon to put others ahead of himself. Shackleton knew how to push the limits until he was able to exceed well above even the most generous of expectations that had been laid out for him. Yet time and time again, he also proved to be a compassionate leader who made sure that he never left a single man behind on his expeditions.

The period following the end of the Civil War has become known as the Reconstruction Era, and during this time there were efforts to achieve two separate goals: to reintegrate the former rebel southern states and the emancipation and granting of civil rights to freed slaves. The Reconstruction Era was a period of turmoil and change in the United States, and it ended not with a complete victory for either side but with a compromise which satisfied no-one...This is the complex and sometimes confusing story of the Reconstruction Era.

From its beginnings as a loosely definable group of philosophical ideas to the culmination of its revolutionary effect on public life in Europe, the Age of Enlightenment is the defining intellectual and cultural movement of the modern world. Using reason as its core value, the Enlightenment believed that progress and the betterment of the human condition was inevitable.

What do you think of when you consider the Middle Ages? Knights in armor and damsels in distress? Vikings plundering monasteries? Religious dissenters burning at the stake? The dead bodies piling up as war, famine, and plague devastated Europe? Think again. While all these are part of the tapestry of the medieval era, the threads of politics, personality and war, culture, religion, education and the arts are vastly more intricate and fascinating.

During the late years of the 18th century, the spirit of Enlightenment thinking and revolution were in the air. The world was changing, moving away from ingrained beliefs about religion, reason, society, and the rights of the individual and turning more toward the laws of nature as interpreted by the scientific method. Nowhere was the influence of this radical new way of thinking more apparent than in France, and the upheaval this caused would come to bloody fruition in the form of revolution.

The Hundred Years War was a series of conflicts waged between England and France between 1337 and 1453. The war involved several generations of kings on both sides and was fought over a single issue: whether the English had the right to rule the kingdom of France. The Hundred Years War was an important element in the creation of modern Europe and in the definition of the national characters of both England and France. This audiobook tells the story of this long, complex, and fascinating conflict.

Creativity is in our bones. It is found in our very DNA, something not known to Leonardo da Vinci or anyone else who lived in his day and time. All he did was to uncover the hidden genius which lay within himself, and he used that inner genius to the very best of his abilities. Leonardo da Vinci is best known for some of the world's most masterful paintings, but he was so much more than merely another artist with paints and brushes. Born to a peasant woman in 1452, Leonardo would go on to astound the world he lived in with his artistry and his inventions.

The Wars of the Roses were a series of civil wars in England fought between the House of Lancaster and the House of York between 1455 and 1485. As family feuds go, the Wars of the Roses were historically significant in changing the trajectory of power in England. This audiobook tells the compelling story of this tumultuous period in English history in succinct yet informative detail that is both educational and entertaining.

The Crusades are the prototype and epitome of the Holy War. The fight to take control of the city of Jerusalem, believed to be the most sacred Holy City to two distinct religions of Christianity and Islam, has lasted far longer than the two centuries of the Crusades, and its reach has extended far further than Europe and the Middle East.

At a time when the very foundations of American democracy seem under threat, the lessons of the past offer a road map for navigating a moment of political crisis. In Democracy Awakening, acclaimed historian Heather Cox Richardson delves into the tumultuous journey of American democracy, tracing the roots of Donald Trump’s “authoritarian experiment” to the earliest days of the republic.

This magisterial history - sure to become the definitive work on the subject - recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.

America is undergoing a massive experiment: It is moving, in fits and starts, toward a multiracial democracy, something few societies have ever done. But the prospect of change has sparked an authoritarian backlash that threatens the very foundations of our political system. Why is democracy under assault here, and not in other wealthy, diversifying nations? And what can we do to save it?

Who is killing America? Is it really Donald Trump and a GOP filled with white supremacists? In this audiobook, Dinesh D’Souza makes the provocative case that Democrats are the ones killing America by turning it into a massive nanny state modeled on the Southern plantation system. Death of a Nation's bracing alternative vision of American history explains the Democratic Party's dark past, reinterprets the roles of figures like Van Buren, FDR, and LBJ, and exposes the hidden truth that racism comes not from Trump or the conservative right but rather from Democrats.

The struggle between individualism and the good of the community as a whole has been the basis of every major disagreement in our history, from the debates at the Constitutional Convention and in the run-up to the Civil War to the fights surrounding the agenda of the Progressives, the New Deal, the civil rights movement, and the Tea Party.

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.

For most of Western history, Sitaraman argues, constitutional thinkers assumed economic inequality was inevitable and inescapable - and they designed governments to prevent class divisions from spilling over into class warfare. The American Constitution is different. Compared to Europe and the ancient world, America was a society of almost unprecedented economic equality, and the founding generation saw this equality as essential for the preservation of America's republic.

While the North prevailed in the Civil War, ending slavery and giving the country a "new birth of freedom," Heather Cox Richardson argues in this provocative work that democracy's blood-soaked victory was ephemeral. The system that had sustained the defeated South moved westward and there established a foothold. It was a natural fit. Settlers from the East had for decades been pushing into the West, where the seizure of Mexican lands at the end of the Mexican-American War and treatment of Native Americans cemented racial hierarchies....

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."

In What It Took to Win, the eminent historian Michael Kazin identifies and assesses the Democratic Party's long-running commitment to creating "moral capitalism" - a system that mixed entrepreneurial freedom with the welfare of workers and consumers. And yet the same party that championed the rights of the white working man also vigorously protected or advanced the causes of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal.

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.

To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.

Our Divided Political Heart will be the must-listen book of the 2012 election campaign. Offering an incisive analysis of how hyper-individualism is poisoning the nation's political atmosphere, E. J. Dionne Jr., argues that Americans can't agree on who we are because we can't agree on who we've been, or what it is, philosophically and spiritually, that makes us Americans.

The first book to appear in the illustrious Oxford History of the United States, this critically-acclaimed volume - a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize - offers an unsurpassed history of the Revolutionary War and the birth of the American republic.

Overall, Tulsa in 1921 was considered a modern, vibrant city. What had fueled this remarkable growth was oil, specifically the discovery of the Glenn Pool oil field in 1905. Within five years, Tulsa had grown from a rural crossroads town in the former Indian Territory into a boom town with more than 10,000 citizens, and as word spread of the fortunes that could be made in Tulsa, people of all races poured into the city.

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.

In this "penetrating new analysis" ( New York Times Book Review), Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of 20th century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of the 1930s and 1940s were created in a deeply discriminatory manner. Through mechanisms designed by southern democrats that specifically excluded maids and farm workers, the gap between blacks and whites actually widened despite postwar prosperity.

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.

The Progressive Era witnessed the nation's most convulsive upheaval, a time of radicalism far beyond the Revolution or anything since. In response to the birth of modern America, one small group of middle-class Americans seized control of the nation and attempted to remake society from bottom to top. They accomplished an astonishing range of triumphs, yet the progressive movement collapsed as the war came to an end amid race riots, strikes, high inflation, and a frenzied Red scare.

This audiobook takes the listener on a journey from what set the stage for war to the aftermaths that continue to impact each of the players in the present day. From the explosion that sank the USS Maine to the recent détente in Cuban-American relations, this audiobook describes the events and their consequences in a thorough yet concise manner that is enjoyable to listen to and packed with historical information.

The Great Depression was one of the most trying eras in American history. All aspects of the US were affected. After the stock market crash of 1929, the nation was thrust into a decade of turmoil and change - in government, the economy, and culture. Many of the changes brought about by the Great Depression remain today.

World War I, or the Great War, was believed to be "the war to end all wars". Because of the incredible extent of destruction and the staggering number of wounded and dead, even those who lived through it could scarcely comprehend its horror. Beginning in 1914, alliances between powerful nations soon plunged the world into a global conflict. Fighting - including miserable trench warfare - broke out in practically every corner of Europe and spread around the world to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The period from 1870 to 1900 in the US has become known as the Gilded Age, during which America was transformed almost beyond recognition. The Gilded Age was an era of entrepreneurs, inventions, industrial development, and new ideas. Most of all, it was a period of rapid and profound change that came at a high cost for the working class.

The Roaring Twenties was a golden age of economic prosperity and liberal social change. Innovations in numerous industries revived a sluggish post-World War I economy, and mass production methods allowed for the standardized, rapid production of various goods, the most notable of which was the automobile. This audiobook tells the compelling story of this raucous period in history in succinct yet informative detail that is both educational and entertaining.