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The Slave's Cause
- A History of Abolition
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 30 hrs and 30 mins
- Categories: History, Americas
Non-member price: $55.66
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Force and Freedom
- Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
- By: Kellie Carter Jackson
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
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From its origins in the 1750s, the White-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what White nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated the Civil War.
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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
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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.
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Very interesting study of secession
- By S. Weingartner on 07-12-2018
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A Nation Under Our Feet
- Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
- By: Steven Hahn
- Narrated by: Noah Michael Levine
- Length: 19 hrs and 17 mins
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This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.
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Confederate Reckoning
- Power and Politics in the Civil War South
- By: Stephanie McCurry
- Narrated by: Teri Schnaubelt
- Length: 16 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
- The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
- By: Daina Ramey Berry
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
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The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives - including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death - in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle", historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments.
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Race and Reunion
- The Civil War in American Memory
- By: David W. Blight
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 20 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.
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Force and Freedom
- Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence
- By: Kellie Carter Jackson
- Narrated by: Machelle Williams
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From its origins in the 1750s, the White-led American abolitionist movement adhered to principles of "moral suasion" and nonviolent resistance as both religious tenet and political strategy. Through tactical violence, argues Carter Jackson, Black abolitionist leaders accomplished what White nonviolent abolitionists could not: creating the conditions that necessitated 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 S. Weingartner on 07-12-2018
-
A Nation Under Our Feet
- Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration
- By: Steven Hahn
- Narrated by: Noah Michael Levine
- Length: 19 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This is the epic story of how African-Americans, in the six decades following slavery, transformed themselves into a political people - an embryonic black nation. As Steven Hahn demonstrates, rural African-Americans were central political actors in the great events of disunion, emancipation, and nation-building. At the same time, Hahn asks us to think in more expansive ways about the nature and boundaries of politics and political practice.
-
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.
-
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh
- The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation
- By: Daina Ramey Berry
- Narrated by: Robin Eller
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
-
Story
The Price for Their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved people through every phase of their lives - including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and death - in the early American domestic slave trade. Covering the full "life cycle", historian Daina Ramey Berry shows the lengths to which enslavers would go to maximize profits and protect their investments.
-
Race and Reunion
- The Civil War in American Memory
- By: David W. Blight
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 20 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Race and Reunion is a history of how the unity of white America was purchased through the increasing segregation of black and white memory of the Civil War. Blight delves deeply into the shifting meanings of death and sacrifice, Reconstruction, the romanticized South of literature, soldiers' reminiscences of battle, the idea of the Lost Cause, and the ritual of Memorial Day. He resurrects the variety of African-American voices and memories of the war and the efforts to preserve the emancipationist legacy in the midst of a culture built on its denial.
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The Comanche Empire
- By: Pekka Hamalainen
- Narrated by: Carla Mercer-Meyer
- Length: 19 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 18th and early 19th centuries, a Native American empire rose to dominate the fiercely contested lands of the American Southwest, the southern Great Plains, and northern Mexico. This powerful empire, built by the Comanche Indians, eclipsed its various European rivals in military prowess, political prestige, economic power, commercial reach, and cultural influence. Yet, until now, the Comanche empire has gone unrecognized in American history. This compelling and original book uncovers the lost story of the Comanches.
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this book could be half the size
- By Anonymous User on 10-02-2020
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Stony the Road
- Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
- By: Henry Louis Gates
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
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A profound new rendering of the struggle by African Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counterrevolution that resubjugated them, as seen through the prism of the war of images and ideas that have left an enduring racist stain on the American mind.
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Unworthy Republic
- The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
- By: Claudio Saunt
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
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In May 1830, the United States formally launched a policy to expel Native Americans from the East to territories west of the Mississippi River. Justified as a humanitarian enterprise, the undertaking was to be systematic and rational, overseen by Washington's small but growing bureaucracy. But as the policy unfolded over the next decade, thousands of Native Americans died under the federal government's auspices, and thousands of others lost their possessions and homelands in an orgy of fraud, intimidation, and violence.
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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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The Condemnation of Blackness
- Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America
- By: Khalil Gibran Muhammad
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Lynch mobs, chain gangs, and popular views of black Southern criminals that defined the Jim Crow South are well known. We know less about the role of the urban North in shaping views of race and crime in American society. Chronicling the emergence of deeply embedded notions of black people as a dangerous race of criminals by explicit contrast to working-class whites and European immigrants, this fascinating book reveals the influence such ideas have had on urban development and social policies.
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Medieval Europe
- By: Chris Wickham
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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The millennium between the breakup of the western Roman Empire and the Reformation was a long and hugely transformative period - one not easily chronicled within a single book. Yet distinguished historian Chris Wickham has taken up the challenge in this landmark book, and he succeeds in producing the most riveting account of medieval Europe in a generation.
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Brilliant
- By Joel Szabo Gillies on 01-12-2020
Publisher's Summary
Received historical wisdom casts abolitionists as bourgeois, mostly white reformers burdened by racial paternalism and economic conservatism. Manisha Sinha overturns this image, broadening her scope beyond the antebellum period usually associated with abolitionism and recasting it as a radical social movement in which men and women, black and white, free and enslaved, found common ground in causes ranging from feminism and utopian socialism to anti-imperialism and efforts to defend the rights of labor. Drawing on extensive archival research, including newly discovered letters and pamphlets, Sinha documents the influence of the Haitian Revolution and the centrality of slave resistance in shaping the ideology and tactics of abolition. This book is a comprehensive new history of the abolition movement in a transnational context. It illustrates how the abolitionist vision ultimately linked the slave's cause to the struggle to redefine American democracy and human rights across the globe.
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What listeners say about The Slave's Cause
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- Erica Olsen
- 09-12-2018
A challenge as an audio book but worth it!
This book is remarkable for its depth and breadth. The density of the research made it a bit of a challenge as an audio book, but I am so grateful for this work. It has broadened my knowledge tremendously.
2 people found this helpful
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- Roger
- 23-07-2017
Thorough, convincing and haunting
This book is meticulously researched, and the themes are presented convincingly.
Sinha has several themes: Her first is that the white abolition movement was inspired by black activity. Sinha does a very good job detailing anti-slavery activities by blacks—from self-emancipation (running away) and uprisings, to periodicals, newspapers and lecture tours. Sinha deservedly gives blacks due credit for their many roles in the abolition movement, in ways that made the evils of slavery harder and harder to ignore. Certainly white abolition was inspired by the plight of the slaves, and certainly slave uprisings motivated whites, but it’s hard to believe that white support for abolition wasn’t also important to slaves. A more nuanced approach might be to argue that black and white abolition fed off each other, in a mutually supportive way.
Sinha’s second theme is how free blacks suffered from the same racial theories that were used to justify slavery. In effect, the free states invented Jim Crow decades before the Civil War. This leads to Sinha’s third theme—that abolition had two goals: emancipation and equality. The Civil War and the Thirteenth Amendment achieved the first goal, but the second would be ignored for a century and is still not fully attained.
Sinha’s fourth theme builds on the two goals of emancipation and equality to demonstrate the joint efforts of abolition and women’s suffrage. While most suffragettes supported abolition and most famous abolitionists like Douglass and Garrison supported women’s suffrage, Sinha explains how what she calls the evangelical wing of abolition could not get comfortable with equality for women. This ultimately led to a break in the two movements and the eventual abandonment of the goal of racial equality by much of the women’s movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Sinha’s fifth theme explains how the abolition movement tried to make common cause with the white working class, with minimal success. Sinha also recounts how many people blamed capitalism for the rise of slavery. But America was part of the British mercantile system when slavery first took hold, so perhaps greed and selfishness, rather than simply capitalism, make a better explanation.
This is a very moving book. Much has been made of the irony of the “land of liberty” being founded on the backs of slavery. Even Samuel Johnson commented on it at the time of the Revolution. This leads to the question how such moral blindness could exist. Edmund Morgan has explained how Virginia used the idea of black inferiority to shake off many of the class-based distinctions among whites that were the inheritance of the Old World. Gordon Wood has explained how slavery was must one of many societal differences accepted in colonial America, but the only one to survive the Revolution. If race was therefore the critical factor, and white Americans also treated Native Americans with the same disdain as they treated blacks, then I wish Sinha had explored the question of whether the abolition movement also tried to make common cause with Native Americans.
This book did so much that I wanted more, which is a sign of a very good book.
Clearly, America made a devil’s bargain to accept slavery to achieve independence from Britain and then to establish the Union. Quite possibly, there was no way to abolish slavery at the time of the Revolution, and perhaps the Union was not strong enough to survive the upheaval of abolition until the 1860s. Sinha, however, has done a marvelous job detailing many of the horrific costs of that bargain. It is a fruitful area for further exploration.
2 people found this helpful
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- John P. Stierman
- 18-10-2017
Essential History--Not Engaging
This tome has enjoyed critical acclaim from leading scholars. It is chock full of information, and I am happy that I read it. Having said that, I did not find the book engaging. And the reader needs to learn more about American history. I cringed when I heard her pronounce, repeatedly, George Whitfield, Roger Taney, and Clement Vallandigham (especially the latter). Having said that, I did enjoy her voice, and think she was a good choice. The errors mentioned previously could have been easily corrected, which makes my wonder how one prepares for reading a book such as this.
1 person found this helpful
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