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Mightier than the Sword
- Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America
- Narrated by: Daniel May
- Length: 10 hrs and 34 mins
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Mightier than the Sword
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In this wide-ranging, brilliantly researched work, David S. Reynolds traces the factors that made Uncle Tom’s Cabin the most influential novel ever written by an American. Upon its 1852 publication, the novel’s vivid depiction of slavery polarized its American readership, ultimately widening the rift that led to the Civil War. Reynolds also charts the novel’s afterlife - including its adaptation into plays, films, and consumer goods - revealing its lasting impact on American entertainment, advertising, and race relations.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Not worth the read
- By arip412 on 05-11-17
By: Edward J. Blum, and others
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Looking for Lorraine
- The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry
- By: Imani Perry
- Narrated by: LisaGay Hamilton
- Length: 8 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 164
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 139
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Story5 out of 5 stars 140
Lorraine Hansberry, who died at thirty-four, was by all accounts a force of nature. Although best-known for her work A Raisin in the Sun, her short life was full of extraordinary experiences and achievements, and she had an unflinching commitment to social justice, which brought her under FBI surveillance when she was barely in her twenties. While her close friends and contemporaries, like James Baldwin and Nina Simone, have been rightly celebrated, her story has been diminished and relegated to one work—until now.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Radiant
- By Rose Brookins on 03-20-19
By: Imani Perry
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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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Overall5 out of 5 stars 116
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 104
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Story5 out of 5 stars 103
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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5 out of 5 stars
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How we remember matters
- By Adam Shields on 04-03-19
By: David W. Blight
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Stony the Road
- Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 388
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 339
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 336
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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5 out of 5 stars
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Valuable examination of Jim Crow and Rise of White Supremacy in America
- By William J Brown on 05-14-19
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Shakespeare in a Divided America
- What His Plays Tell Us About Our Past and Future
- By: James Shapiro
- Narrated by: Fred Sanders
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 324
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 280
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 277
The plays of William Shakespeare are rare common ground in the United States. For well over two centuries, Americans of all stripes—presidents and activists, soldiers and writers, conservatives and liberals alike—have turned to Shakespeare’s works to explore the nation’s fault lines. In a narrative arching from Revolutionary times to the present day, leading scholar James Shapiro traces the unparalleled role of Shakespeare’s four-hundred-year-old tragedies and comedies in illuminating the many concerns on which American identity has turned.
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5 out of 5 stars
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An Entertaining History Lesson
- By David on 08-17-20
By: James Shapiro
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Making History
- The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past
- By: Richard Cohen
- Narrated by: Richard Cohen
- Length: 26 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 37
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 35
There are many stories we can spin about previous ages, but which accounts get told? And by whom? Is there even such a thing as “objective” history? In this “witty, wise, and elegant” (The Spectator), book, Richard Cohen reveals how professional historians and other equally significant witnesses, such as the writers of the Bible, novelists, and political propagandists, influence what becomes the accepted record. Cohen argues, for example, that some historians are practitioners of “Bad History” and twist reality to glorify themselves or their country.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Missing 20 pages from book
- By Rick, Austin on 04-23-22
By: Richard Cohen
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Denmark Vesey's Garden
- Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy
- By: Ethan J. Kytle, Blain Roberts
- Narrated by: Tom Perkins
- Length: 14 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 54
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 47
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 47
A book that strikes at the heart of the recent flare-ups over Confederate symbols in Charlottesville, New Orleans, and elsewhere, Denmark Vesey's Garden reveals the deep roots of these controversies and traces them to the heart of slavery in the United States: Charleston, South Carolina, where almost half of the US slave population stepped onto our shores, where the first shot at Fort Sumter began the Civil War, and where Dylann Roof shot nine people at Emanuel A.M.E. Church, the congregation of Denmark Vesey, a black revolutionary who plotted a massive slave insurrection.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Timely, well-written and enlightening.
- By DG on 06-05-18
By: Ethan J. Kytle, and others
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The Fearless Benjamin Lay
- The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist
- By: Marcus Rediker
- Narrated by: Cornell Womack
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 69
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
The Fearless Benjamin Lay chronicles the transatlantic life and times of a singular and astonishing man - a Quaker dwarf who became one of the first ever to demand the total, unconditional emancipation of all enslaved Africans around the world. He performed public guerrilla theater to shame slave masters, insisting that human bondage violated the fundamental principles of Christianity.
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5 out of 5 stars
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stunning story
- By Austin Choi-Fitz on 10-05-17
By: Marcus Rediker
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Stamped from the Beginning
- The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
- By: Ibram X. Kendi
- Narrated by: Christopher Dontrell Piper
- Length: 19 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 4,068
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3,555
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Story5 out of 5 stars 3,523
Some Americans cling desperately to the myth that we are living in a post-racial society, that the election of the first Black president spelled the doom of racism. In fact, racist thought is alive and well in America - more sophisticated and more insidious than ever. And as award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning, if we have any hope of grappling with this stark reality, we must first understand how racist ideas were developed, disseminated, and enshrined in American society.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Fabulous book, poor reader
- By EBMason on 11-15-17
By: Ibram X. Kendi
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Looking for the Good War
- American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness
- By: Elizabeth D. Samet
- Narrated by: Suzanne Toren
- Length: 14 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 51
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Story4 out of 5 stars 51
In Looking for the Good War, Elizabeth D. Samet reexamines the literature, art, and culture that emerged after World War II, bringing her expertise as a professor of English at West Point to bear on the complexity of the postwar period in national life. She exposes the confusion about American identity that was expressed during and immediately after the war, and the deep national ambivalence toward war, violence, and veterans - all of which were suppressed in subsequent decades by a dangerously sentimental attitude toward the United States' "exceptional" history and destiny.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Essential reading for military officers and political decision makers.
- By Arlene S. Burke on 02-23-22
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America's Prophet
- Moses and the American Story
- By: Bruce Feiler
- Narrated by: Bruce Feiler
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 102
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 52
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Story4 out of 5 stars 53
The exodus story is America's story. Moses is our real founding father. In this groundbreaking book, New York Times best-selling author Bruce Feiler travels through touchstones in American history and traces the biblical prophet's influence from the Mayflower through today.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Another great book
- By TR on 11-06-09
By: Bruce Feiler
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 41
In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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100 Amazing Facts About the Negro
- By: Henry Louis Gates Jr.
- Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 110
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 101
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 100
With élan and erudition - and with winning enthusiasm - Henry Louis Gates Jr. gives us a corrective yet loving homage to Rogers' work. Relying on the latest scholarship, Gates leads us on a romp through African, diasporic, and African American history in question-and-answer format. Among the 100 questions: Who were Africa's first ambassadors to Europe? Who was the first black president in North America? Did Lincoln really free the slaves? Who was history's wealthiest person? What percentage of white Americans have recent African ancestry?
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5 out of 5 stars
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great book
- By Anthony Costello on 06-14-18
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The History of White People
- By: Nell Irvin Painter
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 14 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 868
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 752
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 750
A mind-expanding and myth-destroying exploration of notions of white race—not merely a skin color but also a signal of power, prestige, and beauty to be withheld and granted selectively. Ever since the Enlightenment, race theory and its inevitable partner, racism, have followed a crooked road, constructed by dominant peoples to justify their domination of others. Filling a huge gap in historical literature that long focused on the non-white, eminent historian Nell Irvin Painter guides us through more than two thousand years of Western civilization, tracing not only the invention of the idea of race but also the frequent worship of “whiteness” for economic, social, scientific, and political ends.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Destroys the myth that race is about skin color
- By Emily L. on 08-25-14
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Lincoln's Battle with God
- A President's Struggle with Faith and What It Meant for America
- By: Stephen Mansfield
- Narrated by: Stephen Mansfield
- Length: 7 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 21
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Story5 out of 5 stars 21
Abraham Lincoln is the most beloved of all US presidents. He freed the slaves, gave the world some of its most beautiful phrases, and redefined the meaning of America. He did all of this with wisdom, compassion, and wit. Yet, throughout his life, Lincoln fought with God. In his early years in Illinois, he rejected even the existence of God and became the village atheist. In time, this changed but still he wrestled with the truth of the Bible, preachers, doctrines, the will of God, the providence of God, and then, finally, God’s purposes in the Civil War.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Outstanding
- By Thomas Streveler on 07-23-21
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A Renegade History of the United States
- By: Thaddeus Russell
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 16 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 706
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 571
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 568
American history was driven by clashes between those interested in preserving social order and those more interested in pursuing their own desires---the "respectable" versus the "degenerate", the moral versus the immoral. The more that "bad" people existed, resisted, and won, the greater was our common good. In A Renegade History of the United States, Russell introduces us to the origins of our nation's identity as we have never known them before.
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4 out of 5 stars
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One of those books...that cause brain freeze!
- By Rory on 07-19-13
By: Thaddeus Russell
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What listeners say about Mightier than the Sword
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Alisa (.
- 03-25-22
Fascinating
This is such important history and there was so much I didn’t have a clue about
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Tim Guy
- 03-01-24
A great threading of the needle from the 1850s to now
This book hits all the right points. It describes the times and situation that led up to the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, more than conveys the earthquake that it caused and traces the tremors that are still felt today. My only complaint as a history professor is the author’s use of the words, “conservative” and “progressive”, as if the former were racists, and the latter were egalitarian. The truth be told, it was the opposite. Abraham Lincoln described himself and the anti-slavery movement as conservative when arguing with proslavery forces as to who was the inheritors of the founding fathers’ politically conservative vision for the country. In addition, by my estimation a majority of progressives during the progressive age were blatantly racist, the best example being president Woodrow Wilson. The author even discusses Wilson’s racism, but never describes him as the progressive that he was. There were exceptions of course, but by and large progressives were no admirers of anyone who fell outside of German or Anglo-Saxon heritage. This reality would only change significantly in the 1940s, but arguably racial bigotry still persists in the movement that still calls itself progressive.
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