American Visions

The United States 1800-1860

By: Edward L. Ayres

Narrated by: Brandon Pollock

Length: 9 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

A revealing history of the formative period when voices of dissent and innovation defied power and created visions of America still resonant today.

The early decades of the nineteenth century saw the expansion of slavery, Native dispossession, and wars with Canada and Mexico. Mass immigration and powerful religious movements sent tremors through American society. But even as the powerful defended the status quo, others defied it: voices from the margins moved the center; eccentric visions altered the accepted wisdom, and acts of empathy questioned self-interest. Edward L. Ayers's rich history examines the visions that moved Frederick Douglass, Margaret Fuller, the Native American activist William Apess, and others to challenge entrenched practices and beliefs.

Through decades of award-winning scholarship on the Civil War, Edward L. Ayers has himself ventured beyond the interpretative status quo to recover the range of possibilities embedded in the past as it was lived. Here he turns that distinctive historical sensibility to a period when bold visionaries and critics built vigorous traditions of dissent and innovation into the foundation of the nation. Those traditions remain alive for us today.

©2023 Edward L. Ayers (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Good story, poor reading

The narrator mispronounced so many words that it distracted from the story. But the history was very interesting.

AI Reader?

Many of vignette used to illustrate American
social, cultural , and political trends are interesting and not widely known. That said the numerous egregious misprouncements were very distracting. I finally concluded that in fact there was no human reader but in fact was a AI narrator.