Try free for 30 days
-
Before the Revolution
- America's Ancient Pasts
- Narrated by: Walter Dixon
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
Failed to add items
Add to basket failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from Wish List failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy Now for $33.99
No valid payment method on file.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also picked
-
Seeing Red
- Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
- By: Michael John Witgen
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves.
-
Confederate Reckoning
- Power and Politics in the Civil War South
- By: Stephanie McCurry
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
-
Disunion!
- The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859
- By: Elizabeth R. Varon
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth R. Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic - the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world.
-
-
Very interesting study of secession
- By Sweing on 07-12-2018
-
Reckoning with Slavery
- Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic
- By: Jennifer L. Morgan
- Narrated by: Angel Pean
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic.
-
Into the Bright Sunshine
- Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (Pivotal Moments in American History Series)
- By: Samuel G. Freedman
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president—the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate—but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium.
-
The Cheese and the Worms
- The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
- By: Carlo Ginzburg, Anne C. Tedeschi - translator, John Tedeschi - translator
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society in which Menocchio lived.
-
Seeing Red
- Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
- By: Michael John Witgen
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 13 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves.
-
Confederate Reckoning
- Power and Politics in the Civil War South
- By: Stephanie McCurry
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The story of the Confederate States of America, the proslavery, antidemocratic nation created by white Southern slaveholders to protect their property, has been told many times in heroic and martial narratives. Now, however, Stephanie McCurry tells a very different tale of the Confederate experience. Confederate Reckoning is the startling story of this epic political battle in which women and slaves helped to decide the fate of the Confederacy and the outcome of the Civil War.
-
Disunion!
- The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859
- By: Elizabeth R. Varon
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Americans debating the fate of slavery often invoked the specter of disunion to frighten their opponents. As Elizabeth R. Varon shows, "disunion" connoted the dissolution of the republic - the failure of the founders' effort to establish a stable and lasting representative government. For many Americans in both the North and the South, disunion was a nightmare, a cataclysm that would plunge the nation into the kind of fear and misery that seemed to pervade the rest of the world.
-
-
Very interesting study of secession
- By Sweing on 07-12-2018
-
Reckoning with Slavery
- Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic
- By: Jennifer L. Morgan
- Narrated by: Angel Pean
- Length: 11 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Reckoning with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan draws on the lived experiences of enslaved African women in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to reveal the contours of early modern notions of trade, race, and commodification in the Black Atlantic.
-
Into the Bright Sunshine
- Young Hubert Humphrey and the Fight for Civil Rights (Pivotal Moments in American History Series)
- By: Samuel G. Freedman
- Narrated by: Mike Lenz
- Length: 17 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
During one sweltering week in July 1948, the Democratic Party gathered in Philadelphia for its national convention. The most pressing and controversial issue facing the delegates was not whom to nominate for president—the incumbent, Harry Truman, was the presumptive candidate—but whether the Democrats would finally embrace the cause of civil rights and embed it in their official platform. On the convention's final day, Hubert Humphrey, the relatively obscure mayor of the midsized city of Minneapolis, ascended the podium.
-
The Cheese and the Worms
- The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
- By: Carlo Ginzburg, Anne C. Tedeschi - translator, John Tedeschi - translator
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 7 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Cheese and the Worms is an incisive study of popular culture in the 16th century as seen through the eyes of one man, the miller known as Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society in which Menocchio lived.
-
Liberty Is Sweet
- The Hidden History of the American Revolution
- By: Woody Holton
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
- Length: 22 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Using more than a thousand eyewitness records, Liberty Is Sweet is a “spirited account” (Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution) that explores countless connections between the Patriots of 1776 and other Americans whose passion for freedom often brought them into conflict with the Founding Fathers. “It is all one story,” prizewinning historian Woody Holton writes.
-
The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution: 1763-1789
- By: Robert Middlekauff
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 26 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
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.
-
Indigenous Continent
- The Epic Contest for North America
- By: Pekka Hamalainen
- Narrated by: Kaipo Schwab
- Length: 18 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In Indigenous Continent, acclaimed historian Pekka Hämäläinen presents a sweeping counternarrative that shatters the most basic assumptions about American history. Shifting our perspective away from Jamestown, Plymouth Rock, the Revolution, and other well-trodden episodes on the conventional timeline, he depicts a sovereign world of Native nations whose members, far from helpless victims of colonial violence, dominated the continent for centuries after the first European arrivals.
-
-
First Nations’ sovereignty, survival and pride in the face of massive disruption
- By Toby Eccles on 24-01-2024
-
River of Dark Dreams
- Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom
- By: Walter Johnson
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 19 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
When Jefferson acquired the Louisiana Territory, he envisioned an "empire for liberty" populated by self-sufficient white farmers. Cleared of Native Americans and the remnants of European empires by Andrew Jackson, the Mississippi Valley was transformed instead into a booming capitalist economy commanded by wealthy planters, powered by steam engines, and dependent on the coerced labor of slaves.
-
New England Bound
- Slavery and Colonization in Early America
- By: Wendy Warren
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Wiley
- Length: 10 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a work that fundamentally recasts the history of colonial America, Wendy Warren shows how the institution of slavery was inexorably linked with the first century of English colonization of New England. While most histories of slavery in early America confine themselves to the Southern colonies and the Caribbean, New England Bound forcefully widens the historical aperture to include the entirety of English North America.
-
Heirs of the Founders
- The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster, the Second Generation of American Giants
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 14 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In the early 1800s, three young men strode onto the national stage, elected to Congress at a moment when the Founding Fathers were beginning to retire to their farms. Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, a champion orator known for his eloquence, spoke for the North and its business class. Henry Clay of Kentucky, as dashing as he was ambitious, embodied the hopes of the rising West. South Carolina's John Calhoun, with piercing eyes and an even more piercing intellect, defended the South and slavery.
Publisher's Summary
America began, we are often told, with the Founding Fathers, the men who waged a revolution and created a unique place called the United States. We may acknowledge the early Jamestown and Puritan colonists and mourn the dispossession of Native Americans, but we rarely grapple with the complexity of the nation’s pre-revolutionary past.
In this pathbreaking revision, Daniel Richter shows that the United States has a much deeper history than is apparent - that far from beginning with a clean slate, it is a nation with multiple pasts that stretch back as far as the Middle Ages, pasts whose legacies continue to shape the present.
Exploring a vast range of original sources, Before the Revolution spans more than seven centuries and ranges across North America, Europe, and Africa. Richter recovers the lives of a stunning array of peoples - Indians, Spaniards, French, Dutch, Africans, English - as they struggled with one another and with their own people for control of land and resources. Their struggles occurred in a global context and built upon the remains of what came before. Gradually and unpredictably, distinctive patterns of North American culture took shape on a continent where no one yet imagined there would be nations called the United States, Canada, or Mexico.
By seeing these trajectories on their own dynamic terms, rather than merely as a prelude to independence, Richter’s epic vision reveals the deepest origins of American history.