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The Great Dissenter
- The Story of John Marshall Harlan, America's Judicial Hero
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 19 hrs and 23 mins
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The “superb” (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan.
They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan’s words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom.
But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John’s father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court.
At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation’s prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US.
Harlan’s dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan’s Plessy dissent his “Bible” - and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan’s words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras.
Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a “magnificent” (Douglas Brinkley) and “thoroughly researched” (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system’s most significant failures and most inspiring successes.
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Ida B. Wells committed herself to the needs of those who did not have power. In the eyes of the FBI, this made her a “dangerous negro agitator”. In the annals of history, it makes her an icon. Ida B. the Queen tells the awe-inspiring story of a pioneering woman who was often overlooked and underestimated - a woman who refused to exit a train car meant for White passengers; a woman brought to light the horrors of lynching in America; a woman who cofounded the NAACP.
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I was expecting something different
- By L on 02-01-21
By: Michelle Duster
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These Truths
- A History of the United States
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 29 hrs
- Unabridged
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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.
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Good Story but distracting sound engineering
- By MindSpiker on 11-21-18
By: Jill Lepore
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The Zealot and the Emancipator
- John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom
- By: H. W. Brands
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 16 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Master storyteller and best-selling historian H. W. Brands narrates the epic struggle over slavery as embodied by John Brown and Abraham Lincoln - two men moved to radically different acts to confront our nation’s gravest sin. The Zealot and the Emancipator is acclaimed historian H. W. Brands' thrilling account of how two American giants shaped the war for freedom.
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I Never Knew That!
- By William G. Stuart on 10-19-20
By: H. W. Brands
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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
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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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best book on abolition
- By Shante Nixon on 08-08-24
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Why They Marched
- Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
- By: Susan Ware
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. But Susan Ware uncovered a much broader and more diverse story waiting to be told. Why They Marched is a tribute to the many women who worked tirelessly in communities across the nation, out of the spotlight, protesting, petitioning, and insisting on their right to full citizenship.
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a needed history lesson
- By Jerseycookie on 05-14-22
By: Susan Ware
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One Mighty and Irresistible Tide
- The Epic Struggle over American Immigration, 1924-1965
- By: Jia Lynn Yang
- Narrated by: Laural Merlington
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from Southern and Eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia. In a riveting narrative filled with a fascinating cast of characters, Jia Lynn Yang recounts how lawmakers, activists, and presidents from Truman through LBJ worked relentlessly to abolish the 1924 law.
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Good overview
- By steve thomas on 10-21-20
By: Jia Lynn Yang
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Lincoln in Private
- What His Most Personal Reflections Tell Us About Our Greatest President
- By: Ronald C. White
- Narrated by: Ronald C. White
- Length: 4 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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A deeply private man, shut off even to those who worked closely with him, Abraham Lincoln often captured “his best thoughts", as he called them, in short notes to himself. He would work out his personal stances on the biggest issues of the day, never expecting anyone to see these pieces of writing, which he’d then keep close at hand, in desk drawers and even in his top hat. The profound importance of these notes has been overlooked, because the originals are scattered across several different archives and have never before been brought together and examined as a coherent whole.
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A Good One--Highly Recommend
- By Jeffy on 04-18-23
By: Ronald C. White
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Reconstruction
- A Concise History
- By: Allen C. Guelzo
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 4 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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The era known as Reconstruction is one of the unhappiest times in American history. It succeeded in reuniting the nation politically after the Civil War but in little else. Conflict shifted from the battlefield to the Capitol as Congress warred with President Andrew Johnson over just what to do with the South. Johnson's plan of Presidential Reconstruction, which was sympathetic to the former Confederacy, would ultimately lead to his impeachment and the institution of Radical Reconstruction.
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Very Well Done
- By Rob Welch on 08-20-21
By: Allen C. Guelzo
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Separate
- The Story of Plessy V. Ferguson, and America's Journey from Slavery to Segregation
- By: Steve Luxenberg
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 19 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court case synonymous with "separate but equal", created remarkably little stir when the justices announced their near-unanimous decision on May 18, 1896. Yet it is one of the most compelling and dramatic stories of the 19th century, whose outcome embraced and protected segregation, and whose reverberations are still felt into the 21st. Separate spans a striking range of characters and landscapes, bound together by the defining issue of their time and ours - race and equality.
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Black and White in shades of grey
- By JKC on 03-15-19
By: Steve Luxenberg
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It Wasn’t About Slavery
- Exposing the Great Lie of the Civil War
- By: Samuel W. Mitcham
- Narrated by: John McLain
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Was the Civil War really about slavery? Or was it a war fought over money? Civil War historian Samuel W. Mitcham Jr., (Vicksburg, Bust Hell Wide Open) opens his fascinating new book, It Wasn't About Slavery, with Dr. Grady McWhiney's claim that "what passes as standard American history is really Yankee history written by New Englanders or their puppets to glorify Yankee heroes and ideals".
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Abbeville Condensed
- By AC Gleason on 07-16-20
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Lawyers don’t often admit this in mixed company, but Madiba Dennie wants to let you in on a secret: There's no one true way to interpret the Constitution. Americans saw just how subjective it can be when the Supreme Court denied basic bodily autonomy to millions of people in its Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization decision, suggesting that our rights and liberties are frozen in a cherry-picked version of history. This is a line of constitutional interpretation called originalism—a framework that says we must be constrained by the meaning of the Constitution's text when it was written.
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The relatively new judicial philosophy of textualism dominates the Supreme Court. Textualists claim that the right way to interpret the Constitution and statutes is to read the text carefully and examine the language as it was understood at the time the documents were written. This, however, is not Justice Breyer’s philosophy nor has it been the traditional way to interpret the Constitution since the time of Chief Justice John Marshall. Justice Breyer recalls Marshall’s exhortation that the Constitution must be a workable set of principles to be interpreted by subsequent generations.
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Very Annoying Narration
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What listeners say about The Great Dissenter
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- redfox
- 05-16-24
Book not as great as its subject
Was a bit all over the place, in part because of the decision to profile Robert Harlan in parallel. That the Justice had personal experience with the lives and merits of educated Blacks is relevant to his defense of civil rights, but it meant a lot of familial byways and anecdotes pretty far afield. Still, a nice mix of history, legal history, and personal story of an important figure.
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- TomDuncombe
- 11-16-21
best book I've heard on audible
the right book at the right time. read by a narrator who knows how to pronounce everyone's name.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-27-21
Heart for humanity and respect for the constitution
I did not know of Supreme Justice John Marshall. I also did not know his impact upon our country’s major legal decisions. It speaks loudly that he is revered by both conservative and liberal Supreme Court Justices. His history and Robert James Harlan’s life are compelling stories of the impact of race after the Civil War. I recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand our US history from the Civil War period to today.
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- Jean
- 07-27-22
Fantastic
I found this biography fascinating. The book is about John Marshall Harlan (1833-1911). Harlan is remembered for three outstanding dissents in the Court’s most disconcerting rulings. He is the lone dissenting vote (8-1) in Plessy V Ferguson in 1896. This is “the separate but equal” doctrine.
I found the sections of the Court battles about income tax and labor laws most interesting and in many ways the arguments have not changed. Particularly the reasons the rich gave for why the rent payments they received should not be taxed or why government had no right to tell them to limit employee’s hours to no more than twelve hours per day. I found it most helpful to pause and see where the Court has been before in controversial discissions.
The author, Peter Canellos, did an excellent job researching information for this book and presenting a fairly unbiased report. If you are looking for a great biography to read this summer, try this book.
The book is nineteen hours and twenty-three minutes. Arthur Morey does a good job narrating the book.
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- BRead
- 03-08-22
A story that needs to be heard.
Well written. Well narrated. It is a story of how people can change for the better and for worse. It is also a story that exemplifies why it is worth it to choose the right path even when it is against the tide and the full impact is not immediately known.
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- Big Law
- 07-21-22
Brilliant, wonderful book
I cannot praise this book enough. Wonderfully written and told story about a giant in American history. In a world with a history absent segregation, Harlan would be even more well known today. I’m grateful to Mr. Canellos for telling Harlan’s story. Also appreciative to Arthur Morey for his outstanding performance. I highly recommend this book for all those interested in American history.
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- Thomas Shanklin
- 10-05-21
Pleasantly surprised.
I truly enjoyed this book. Senate minority leader recommended it on Book TV. I highly recommend this book.
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- John K.
- 09-17-21
Magnificent Biography
Every American should read this man’s story. His courage and prescience will stand testament against the revisionists who portray our sad and tumultuous history as purely a chronicle of racism. Justice Harlan turned the tide of American history toward a colorblind society that most strive to achieve. God Bless him!
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- Amazon Customer
- 12-01-21
An eye opening experience
Justice Harlan was unknown to me before listening to this book.
He was an individualist, certainly the great dissenter and as proven by much later decisions of the highest court in our land shown to be not only right on his decisions but many many years ahead of his time.
I think you will learn much and enjoy the journey by listening to this book.
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- Patrick Keegan
- 11-02-21
Very enjoyable and enlightening
Great story of an American hero unknown to many. This story would make a good movie.
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