Zebulon Pike
The Life and Legacy of One of Early America’s Most Important Explorers
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Narrated by:
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Colin Fluxman
About this listen
Throughout his presidency at the beginning of the 19th century, Thomas Jefferson had worried about the future of the western US, seeing that settlements in the Ohio Valley and lower South relied upon the Mississippi River. France’s controls over the region, in his estimation, put the US at a severe disadvantage. His solution proved successful beyond his wildest imagination, for Napoleon did not only sell New Orleans to the US, the portion that Jefferson instructed his ministers to make an offer on, but all of “New France,” the entire area of Louisiana. Jefferson might have said later that his purchase of the territory “strained” but did not “break” the Constitution, but also should have boasted that, with one stroke, he had removed one less obstacle to American expansionism.
The Louisiana Purchase encompassed all or part of 15 current U.S. states and two Canadian provinces, including Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, parts of Minnesota that were west of the Mississippi River, most of North Dakota, nearly all of South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, Northern Texas, the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide, and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans (parts of this area were still claimed by Spain at the time of the Purchase.) In addition, the Louisiana Purchase contained small portions of land that would eventually become part of the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan. The purchase, which doubled the size of the young nation, comprises around 23 percent of current American territory.
The purchase allowed Jefferson to plan something he had talked about since taking office: an expedition deep into the unmapped and largely unknown continent with the final destination being the Pacific Ocean. This could prove the most significant of the goals that Jefferson - a person who thought of himself as a scientifically-minded thinker - wanted to accomplish as president.
Given that Lewis and Clark remain so famous, it was inevitable that the other American explorers would be overlooked, particularly William Eaton, the hero of the Battle of Derna in the Barnaby Wars, and Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the explorer of the Mississippi. In the case of Pike, Orsi suggests that the explorer is overlooked and in some cases slighted due to what the expeditions did and did not accomplish. Eaton and Pike represented “the first wave of Manifest Destiny, expanding the republican principles of liberty and citizenship in the world.”
Contrasted to that patriotic sentiment are caveats and questions. The career of Zebulon Pike was “dominated by ambiguously motivated explorations of the American West.”[2] With the procurement of the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the size of the nation, Pike had the full force of American authority at his disposal, and his travels through the Colorado Rockies into New Mexico pushed the boundaries between America and Spain. Captured by Spanish officials for illegal entry, he was finally released back into American custody after a year’s time with a volume of new information on Spanish territory, its economy, and its military configuration. This sparked a debate about whether the capture was planned by the American government itself.
Pike’s return is still debated, as is his relationship with General James Wilkinson and Aaron Burr. The controversy is relevant to Burr’s alleged conspiracy to establish a competing empire in the American Southwest, or perhaps as a way of conquering Spanish America without involving the White House. Pike’s papers, confiscated by the Spanish, have complicated the search for the truth, and any evidence of his complicity remains confidential, in part because of the unpredictable explorer’s unpredictable demise.
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The British Empire
- By: Stephen W. Sears
- Narrated by: Corrie James
- Length: 30 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Here is the story of how the English acquired their vast domain; how they ruled, maintained, and exploited it; and how, within decades, they presided over its dissolution. Here are Britain's triumphs and also her stinging defeats, her heroes and her scoundrels. It is a full and fascinating chronicle of the growth of the British Empire and its people and of the impact that empire had on the rest of the world.
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Great presentation of a broad historical narrative
- By MiamiMe on 03-27-18
By: Stephen W. Sears
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The Black Count
- Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
- By: Tom Reiss
- Narrated by: Paul Michael
- Length: 13 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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General Alex Dumas is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar—because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers.
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The story behind the greatest novelist of all time
- By Melinda on 01-13-13
By: Tom Reiss
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The Greek Revolution
- 1821 and the Making of Modern Europe
- By: Mark Mazower
- Narrated by: John Lee, Mark Mazower
- Length: 20 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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As Mark Mazower shows us in his enthralling and definitive new account, myths about the Greek War of Independence outpaced the facts from the very beginning, and for good reason. This was an unlikely cause, against long odds, a disorganized collection of Greek patriots up against what was still one of the most storied empires in the world, the Ottomans. The revolutionaries needed all the help they could get.
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Excellent, had it not been for the narrator
- By Jean N on 05-15-22
By: Mark Mazower
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Liberty's Exiles
- American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World
- By: Maya Jasanoff
- Narrated by: L. J. Ganser
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Maya Jasanoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her groundbreaking work Liberty's Exiles. After the American Revolution, 60,000 British loyalists fled the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other points abroad. Jasanoff traces their harrowing journeys across the globe, shedding light on their ambitions, the post-revolutionary world they encountered, and their legacies.
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Staggering in its Breadth
- By Anders P Morley on 02-21-21
By: Maya Jasanoff
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George Washington
- The Wonder of the Age
- By: John Rhodehamel
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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As editor of the award-winning Library of America collection of George Washington's writings and a curator of the great man's original papers, John Rhodehamel has established himself as an authority of our nation's preeminent founding father. Rhodehamel examines George Washington as a public figure, arguing that the man - who first achieved fame in his early twenties - is inextricably bound to his mythic status.
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Not what I expected for an unabridged book
- By David Osborne Jr. on 04-13-17
By: John Rhodehamel
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Daniel Morgan: A Revolutionary Life
- By: Albert Louis Zambone
- Narrated by: Tom Taverna
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 17, 1781, at Cowpens, South Carolina, the notorious British cavalry officer Banastre Tarleton and his legion had been destroyed along with the cream of Lord Cornwallis’s troops. The man who planned and executed this stunning American victory was Daniel Morgan. Once a barely literate backcountry laborer, Morgan now stood at the pinnacle of American martial success. When George Washington called for troops to join him at the siege of Boston in 1775, Morgan organized a select group of riflemen and headed north.
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Good Book
- By Rob K on 04-08-20
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George Washington: History in an Hour
- By: David B. McCoy
- Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
- Length: 1 hr and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Love history? Know your stuff with History in an Hour.George Washington – a figure synonymous with American history. His image is known worldwide, marked on American currency, postage stamps – even a state is named after him. George Washington in an Hour explores the man beneath the symbol. This is the essential chronicle of Washington’s life – his rise from middle class Virginian upbringing to America’s first President, elected unanimously twice.
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Great information packed into one hour
- By Jerry on 04-08-22
By: David B. McCoy
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Shadows at Dawn
- A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History
- By: Karl Jacoby
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 10 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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In April 1871, a group of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O'odham Indians surrounded an Apache village at dawn and murdered nearly 150 men, women, and children in their sleep. In the past century, the attack, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, contemporary newspaper reports, and the participants' own accounts, prizewinning author Karl Jacoby brings this perplexing incident and tumultuous era to life to paint a sweeping panorama of the American Southwest.
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An excellent coverage of early Arizona History.
- By AHB on 08-22-21
By: Karl Jacoby
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Napoleon
- A Concise Biography
- By: David A. Bell
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 4 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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David Bell emphasizes the astonishing sense of human possibility that Napoleon represented. Bell emphasizes the importance of the French Revolution in understanding Napoleon's career. The revolution made possible the unprecedented concentration of political authority that Napoleon accrued. Without the political changes brought about by the revolution, Napoleon could not have fought his wars. Without the wars, he could not have seized and held onto power. Though his virtual dictatorship betrayed the ideals of liberty and equality, his life and career were revolutionary.
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Perfect introduction to Napoleon
- By DJP on 10-17-20
By: David A. Bell
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Autumn of the Black Snake
- The Creation of the U.S. Army and the Invasion That Opened the West
- By: William Hogeland
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 15 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1783, with the signing of the Peace of Paris, the American Revolution was complete. And yet even as the newly independent United States secured peace with Great Britain, it found itself losing an escalating military conflict on its borderlands. The enemy was the indigenous people of the Ohio Valley, who rightly saw the new nation as a threat to their existence.
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HISS-story, Not History
- By N/A on 11-11-21
By: William Hogeland
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Lone Star Nation
- How a Ragged Army of Courageous Volunteers Won the Battle for Texas Independence
- By: H.W. Brands
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 17 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Lone Star Nation is the gripping story of Texas' precarious journey to statehood, from its early colonization in the 1820s to the shocking massacres of Texas loyalists at the Alamo and Goliad by the Mexican army, from its rough-and-tumble years as a land overrun by the Comanches to its day of liberation as an upstart republic.
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Texas: From Spanish colony to statehood
- By Brian Shivers on 04-06-05
By: H.W. Brands
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The Island at the Center of the World
- The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
- By: Russell Shorto
- Narrated by: Russell Shorto
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.
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Incomplete history, but fun. Performance is poor.
- By Matthew on 11-27-18
By: Russell Shorto