North America Audiobooks | History

Voices from Gettysburg: Letters, Papers, and Memoirs from the Greatest Battle of the Civil War

The voices of those who witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg and its aftermath with their own eyes – who saw the bloodshed, heard its din, trembled in its crash, struggled with its aftermath – are collected for the first time by Allen C. Guelzo, America’s foremost Civil War scholar, in this moving and sobering oral history. This treasure trove of original documents – many never-before published – creates a uniquely personal, day-by-day eyewitness account of the monumental collision at Gettysburg, in the words of the commanders, soldiers, politicians, and civilians from both the North and the South who experienced firsthand the changing course of the Civil War. Three pivotal days in 1963 – July 1st through July 3rd – marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. While the audible voices of those who experienced it first-hand in that crossroads town of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania have been lost to history, their words live on in Voices from Gettysburg. Gathering a treasure trove of powerful, rare, and haunting original documents, New York Times bestselling author and award-winning historian Allen C. Guelzo presents a uniquely readable and intimate oral history of the Civil War’s turning point. We hear from a Union staff officer, a Confederate amputee, artilleryman, a sympathetic Northern woman, a Union prisoner-of-war, Union colonels and Confederate generals, a drummer boy, a fearful college student, those who orchestrated the Battle of Gettysburg, those who survived it, and those who would perish. With introductions from Guelzo, a detailed order of battle, and comprehensive list of every unit that fought, each of these original maps, personal letters, excerpts from forgotten memoirs, and more never-before-published documents offers an unprecedented narrative of the Great Rebellion and the impetus for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – in the authentic words of fire, blood, and smoke by those who saw the battle, heard its din, trembled in its crash, and struggled with its aftermath.

Allen C. Guelzo (Author), George Guidall, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom during the Civil War

The story of the Combahee River Raid, one of Harriet Tubman's most extraordinary accomplishments, based on original documents and written by a descendant of one of the participants Edda L. Fields-Black shows how Tubman commanded a ring of spies, scouts, and pilots and participated in military expeditions behind Confederate lines. On June 2, 1863, Tubman and her crew piloted two regiments of Black US Army soldiers, the Second South Carolina Volunteers, and their white commanders up coastal South Carolina's Combahee River in three gunboats. In a matter of hours, they torched eight rice plantations and liberated 730 people. Using previously unexamined documents, Fields-Black brings to life intergenerational, extended enslaved families, neighbors, praise-house members, and sweethearts forced to work in South Carolina's deadly tidal rice swamps, sold, and separated during the antebellum period. When Tubman and the gunboats arrived and blew their steam whistles, many of those people clambered aboard, sailed to freedom, and were eventually reunited with their families. The able-bodied Black men freed in the Combahee River Raid enlisted in the Second South Carolina Volunteers and fought behind Confederate lines for the freedom of others still enslaved not just in South Carolina but Georgia and Florida.

Dr. Edda L. Fields-Black (Author), Machelle Williams (Narrator)

Audiobook

Zev's Los Angeles: A Political Memoir: From Boyle Heights to the Halls of Power

This is the story of Zev Yaroslavsky, the son of Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to the United States in the early 1920s. His memoir charts the journey of a young social activist who battled to free Soviet Jews before becoming one of the most consequential elected officials in Southern California. Fiercely independent, he combined an activist's passion with a seasoned politician's skill to challenge the region's power brokers. He fought the Los Angeles Police Department's excessive force and political spying policies, led the effort to ban local taxes from funding the 1984 Olympics, teamed with President Clinton to avert a catastrophic county bankruptcy, helped develop LA's modern transit system, won a bruising battle with real estate interests to save the Santa Monica Mountains from rapacious development, and was pivotal in the development of Walt Disney Concert Hall and the modernization of the iconic Hollywood Bowl. 'I may be part of the establishment,' he said on the day he was first sworn into office, 'but the establishment is not part of me.'

Josh Getlin, Zev Yaroslavsky (Author), Graham Rowat (Narrator)

Audiobook

Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father's Journey

Andy Griffith (1926-2012) is one of North Carolina's most beloved exports, capturing America's heart as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Evan Dalton Smith was born in the North Carolina Piedmont over four decades after Andy, just an hour south of Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy. Both were small-town boys who grew up in similar places, where the counties were dry and the churches plentiful. But for both, there was darkness, crushed hopes, and tragedy, hidden just below the surface. For Smith and many generations in North Carolina, Andy Griffith was like the air-everywhere, all the time, a part of daily life. Even after he left the state, Smith always felt the pull of home and the lingering ghost of Andy alongside it. This is an exploration on celebrity and the self, on home and what that means when you leave it, and why we love and admire the people we do-even if we've never met them-all told through the entwined lives of iconic actor Andy Griffith and writer Evan Dalton Smith. It is through Smith's telling of Griffith's life that he finds his own story, one that is both informed by and freed from the legacy of one of North Carolina's most famous sons.

Evan Dalton Smith (Author), Evan Dalton Smith (Narrator)

Audiobook

American Civil Wars: A Continental History 1850-1873

A Pulitzer Prize winner’s masterful history of the Civil War and its reverberations across the continent. In a beautifully crafted narrative of soaring ideals and sordid politics, of civil war and foreign invasion, Alan Taylor presents a pivotal twenty-year period in which the United States, Mexico, and Canada all transformed themselves into nations. The American Civil War stands at the center of the story, its military dimension and the drama of emancipation the focus. The American West and its Native peoples feature prominently, with fascinating detail on California and the southwest borderlands. The instability in the United States shakes the continent: it invites a French invasion of Mexico that fuels long-standing hostilities between Conservative and Liberal forces; in Canada it raises the urgency of a continental confederation to manage the differences of Francophones and Anglophones. The vivid character portraits throughout are indelible: from Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and the great Liberal leader Benito Juárez to key Black abolitionists such as Martin Delany and Mary Ann Shadd.

Alan Taylor (Author), Graham Winton (Narrator)

Audiobook

Black Meme: The History of the Images that Make Us

Representations of Blackness have always been integral to our understanding of of the modern world. In Black Meme, Legacy Russell, author of Glitch Feminism, explores the construct, culture, and material of the 'meme' as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to present day. Mining archival and contemporary media Russell explores the impact of Blackness, Black life, and death on contemporary conceptions of viral culture, borne in the age of the internet. These meditations include: the circulation of Lynching postcards; Jet magazine's publication of a picture of Emmett Till in his open casket; how the televised broadcast of protesters in Selma enters the nation's living room and changed the debate on civil rights; how a citizen-recorded video of the Rodney King beating at the hands of the LAPD became known as the 'first viral video'; what the Anita Hill hearings tell us about the media's creation of the Black icon; Tamara Lanier's fight to reclaim the photos of her enslaved ancestors, Renty and Delia, from Harvard's archive; the Facebook Live recording by Lavish 'Diamond' Reynolds of the murder of her partner Philando Castile by the police after being stopped for a broken tail light; and more. Legacy Russell explores the power of these tokens and argues that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form.

Legacy Russell (Author), Janina Edwards (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Bourbon Drinker’s Companion: A Guide to American Distilleries, with Travel Advice, Folklore, and

This insider's guide to American distilleries offers colorful lore, regional history, and tasting notes for bourbon, whiskey, and rye. The Bourbon Drinker's Companion is a narrative journey into the heart of American craft distilleries, taking listeners from the well-known Jim Beam Booker Noe plant to craft whiskey brewers on the West Coast to the emerging new traditional distillers of the South, in search of America's best whiskey. Bestselling author Colin Spoelman is back to celebrate all things whiskey as he explores the effect branding, taste, region, and distilling processes have on America's beloved and most notorious drink. Head down to Louisville to visit Angel's Envy Distillery, go east to Jeptha Creed Distillery in Shelbyville, Kentucky, and then be sure to hit one of America's oldest distilleries, Buffalo Trace, in nearby Frankfurt, as you follow the road of spirits. Complete with sidebars highlighting key whiskies, bourbons, and ryes from each distillery, as well as tasting notes, pricing information, distilling methods, and more, The Bourbon Drinker's Companion is the perfect plus one to bring along.

Colin Spoelman (Author), Chris Abernathy (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Gas and Flame Men: Baseball and the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I

The Gas and Flame Men is the first full account of Major League ballplayers who served in the Chemical Warfare Service during World War I. Four players, two club executives, and a manager served in the small and hastily formed branch, six of them as gas officers. Remarkably, five of the seven-Christy Mathewson, Branch Rickey, Ty Cobb, George Sisler, and Eppa 'Jeptha' Rixey-are now enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York. The son of a sixth Hall of Famer, player and manager Ned Hanlon, was a young officer killed in action in France with the First Gas Regiment. Prominent chemical soldiers also included veteran Major League catcher and future manager George 'Gabby' Street and Boston Braves president and former Harvard football coach Percy D. Haughton. The Gas and Flame Men explores how these famous baseball men, along with an eclectic mix of polo players, collegiate baseball and football stars, professors, architects, and prominent social figures all came together in the Chemical Warfare Service. Jim Leeke examines their service and its long-term effects on their physical and mental health-and on Major League Baseball and the world of sports. The Gas and Flame Men also addresses historical inaccuracies and misperceptions surrounding Christy Mathewson's early death from tuberculosis, long attributed to wartime gas exposure.

Jim Leeke (Author), Barry Abrams (Narrator)

Audiobook

Glorious Lessons: John Trumbull, Painter of the American Revolution

The complicated life and legacy of John Trumbull, whose paintings portrayed both the struggle and the principles that distinguished America's founding moment John Trumbull (1756-1843) experienced the American Revolution firsthand-he served as aid to George Washington and Horatio Gates, was shot at, and was jailed as a spy. He made it his mission to record the war, giving visual form to what most citizens of the new United States thought: that they had brought into the world a great and unprecedented political experiment. His purpose, he wrote, was 'to preserve and diffuse the memory of the noblest series of actions which have ever presented themselves in the history of man.' Although Trumbull's contemporaries viewed him as a painter, Trumbull thought of himself as a historian. Richard Brookhiser tells Trumbull's story of acclaim and recognition, a story complicated by provincialism, war, a messy personal life, and, ultimately, changing fashion. He shows how the artist's fifty-year project embodied the meaning of American exceptionalism and played a key role in defining the values of the new country. Trumbull depicted the story of self-rule in the modern world-a story as important and as contested today as it was 250 years ago.

Richard Brookhiser (Author), Rick Adamson, TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920

A groundbreaking, expansive new account of Reconstruction that fundamentally alters our view of this formative period in American history. In The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic, acclaimed historian Manisha Sinha expands our view beyond the accepted temporal and spatial bounds of Reconstruction, which is customarily said to have begun in 1865 with the end of the war, and to have come to a close when the 'corrupt bargain' of 1877 put Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House in exchange for the fall of the last southern Reconstruction state governments. Sinha's startlingly original account opens in 1860 with the election of Abraham Lincoln that triggered the secession of the Deep South states, and takes us all the way to 1920 and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which granted women the right to vote-and which Sinha calls the 'last Reconstruction amendment.' A sweeping narrative that remakes our understanding of perhaps the most consequential period in American history, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic shows how the great contest of that age is also the great contest of our age-and serves as a necessary reminder of how young and fragile our democracy truly is.

Manisha Sinha (Author), Deepa Samuel (Narrator)

Audiobook

Gunflint Falling: Blowdown in the Boundary Waters

On July 4, 1999, in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a bizarre confluence of meteorological events resulted in the most damaging blowdown in the region's history. Gunflint Falling tells the story of this devastating storm from the perspectives of those who were on the ground before, during, and after the catastrophic event. The forecasts in Duluth predicted the day would be 'warm and humid. Partly sunny with a 30% chance of thunderstorms.' But as the evening settled, the first eyewitness accounts began to tell a terrifying story. Friends camping on Lake Polly watched in wonder as the sky turned green and the winds began to whip. They scrambled to pull canoes on shore when a tree snapped and struck one of them in the head, rendering her unconscious. Three women enjoying their last day of a camping trip took shelter in their tent as winds increased. Water drenched the nylon walls as trees crashed around them, one flattening the tent and pinning a woman beneath it. A family vacationing at their cabin dodged falling trees and strained against straight-line winds as they sprinted from the cabin to the safest place they knew: a crawl space underneath it. They watched as trees snapped, their twisted root balls torn out of the earth. By the time the storm began to subside, falling trees had injured approximately sixty people, but amazingly, no one died.

Cary J. Griffith (Author), Jonathan Yen (Narrator)

Audiobook

Gunflint Burning: Fire in the Boundary Waters

The story of the Ham Lake fire, at the time the most destructive wildfire in modern Minnesota history-the blaze, the firefighters' battle, the human toll Gunflint Burning is a comprehensive account of the dramatic events around the Ham Lake fire of 2007, one of the largest wildfires in Minnesota history. In sharp detail, Cary J. Griffith describes the key events of the fire as they unfold, transporting listeners to the front lines of an epic struggle that was at times heroic, tragic, and sublime.

Cary J. Griffith (Author), Jonathan Yen (Narrator)

Audiobook

North America Audiobooks in History