Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

Audiobook

A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent

Audiobook

The Radicalism of the American Revolution

Audiobook

April 1865: The Month That Saved America

Audiobook

The Union War

Audiobook

America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union

Audiobook

The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America

Audiobook

The Road to Disunion: Volume II: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861

Audiobook

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Audiobook

American Republics: A Continental History of the United States 1783-1850

Audiobook

Washington: The Making of the American Capital

Audiobook

Hymns of the Republic: The Story of the Final Year of the American Civil War

Audiobook

Henry Clay: The Essential American

Audiobook

Henry Clay: The Man Who Would Be President

Audiobook

The War That Made America: A Short History of the French and Indian War

Audiobook

The Triumph of William McKinley: Why the Election of 1896 Still Matters

Audiobook

A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830-1910

Audiobook

War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918

Audiobook

John Jay: Founding Father

Audiobook

1956: The World in Revolt

Audiobook

Paul Revere's Ride

Audiobook

The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government

Audiobook

John Tyler, the Accidental President

Audiobook

Brotherhood of the Revolution: How America's Founders Forged a New Nation

Audiobook

The Money Men: Capitalism, Democracy, and the Hundred Years' War over the American Dollar

Audiobook

The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89: Fourth Edition

Audiobook

Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation

Audiobook

Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America

Audiobook

The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century

Audiobook

Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

Audiobook

The American Revolution: A History

Audiobook

The Fourth Turning Is Here: What the Seasons of History Tell Us about How and When This Crisis Will End

Audiobook

Killing the Guys Who Killed the Guy Who Killed Lincoln: A Nutty Story About Edwin Booth and Boston Corbett

Audiobook

Land of Delusion: Out on the edge with the crackpots and conspiracy-mongers remaking our shared reality

Audiobook

Killing the Witches: The Horror of Salem, Massachusetts

Audiobook

1776

Audiobook

Sins of the Founding Father: George Washington, the Indigenous Tribes, and the Decisions that Shaped America’s Future

Audiobook

Lies My Teacher Told Me: 2nd Edition

Audiobook

Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race

Audiobook

The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of September 11, 2001

Audiobook

Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom

Audiobook

The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women

Audiobook

Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America

Audiobook

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History

Audiobook

Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation

Audiobook

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States

Audiobook

The Book of Charlie

Audiobook

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Audiobook

The Untold History of the United States

Audiobook

Dragonfire: Four Days That (Almost) Changed America

Audiobook

Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

Audiobook

Valiant Women: The Extraordinary American Servicewomen Who Helped Win World War II

Audiobook

Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage

Audiobook

Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty

Audiobook

South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

Audiobook

John Adams

Audiobook

UFO: The Inside Story of the US Government's Search for Alien Life Here—and Out There

Audiobook

The Indifferent Stars Above: The Harrowing Saga of the Donner Party

Audiobook

The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

Audiobook

Ghosts of Honolulu: A Japanese Spy, A Japanese American Spy Hunter, and the Untold Story of Pearl Harbor

Audiobook

American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

Podcast episode

141. Richard Kreitner — Break it Up: Secession, Division, and the Secret History of America’s Imperfect Union: The provocative thesis of is simple: The United States has never lived up to its name—and never will. The disunionist impulse may have found its greatest expression in the Civil War, but as Break It Up shows, the seduction of secession wasn’t...

Podcast episode

297 Claudio Saunt, Indian Removal Act of 1830: The history of Native American land dispossession is as old as the story of colonization. European colonists came to the Americas, and the Caribbean, wanting land for farms and settlement so they found ways to acquire lands from indigenous peoples by...

Podcast episode

Lecture 25 - The "End" of Reconstruction: Disputed Election of 1876, and the "Compromise of 1877": This lecture focuses on the role of white southern terrorist violence in brining about the end of Reconstruction. Professor Blight begins with an account the Colfax Massacre. Colfax, Louisiana was the sight of the largest mass murder in U.S. history, when a white mob killed dozens of African Americans in the April of 1873. Two Supreme Court decisions would do in the judicial realm what the Colfax Massacre had done in the political. On the same day as the Colfax Massacre, the Supreme Court offered a narrow reading of the 14th Amendment in the Slaughterhouse cases, signaling a judicial retreat from the radicalism of the early Reconstruction years. The Cruikshank case, two years later, would overturn the convictions of the only three men sentenced for their involvement in Colfax, and marked another step away from reconstruction. Professor Blight concludes with the Panic of 1873 and the seemi

Podcast episode

Professor Allen Guelzo on Robert E. Lee

Podcast episode

Lecture 23 - Black Reconstruction in the South: The Freedpeople and the Economics of Land and Labor: Professor Blight begins this lecture in Washington, where the passage of the first Reconstruction Act by Congressional Republicans radically altered the direction of Reconstruction. The Act invalidated the reconstituted Southern legislatures, establishing five military districts in the South and insisting upon black suffrage as a condition to readmission. The eventful year 1868 saw the impeachment of one president (Andrew Johnson) and the election of another (Ulysses S. Grant). Meanwhile, southern African Americans struggle to reap the promises of freedom in the face of economic disempowerment and a committed campaign of white supremacist violence. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

Max Boot: The Road Not Taken: Author Max Boot returns to the Pritzker Military Museum & Library to talk about his book "The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam"

Podcast episode

Shadi Hamid: Is There a Problem of Democracy in the Middle East? Or Is the Problem With an American Misunderstanding of “Democracy”?: In conversation with Andrew Keen

Podcast episode

Best of - David McCullough, Stephen Ambrose and David Herbert Donald: Time Travelers: It is the rare writer who can make history so compelling, so alive, that people will flock to read it. David McCullough, who died last Sunday, was one of those writers. He was the author of two Pulitzer Prize-winning books: one about President Harry Truman and one about President John Adams. In honor of Mr. McCullough, we are reposting this episode from 2020 which featured him and two other great presidential historians: Stephen Ambrose and David Herbert Donald. They talk here about their subjects as if they had gone back in time and returned, breathless, to share the stories they'd heard. And each writer explains how he fell under the spell of history and made it his life's work.

Podcast episode

Lecture 1 - Introductions: Why Does the Civil War Era Have a Hold on American Historical Imagination?: Professor Blight offers an introduction to the course. He summarizes some of the course readings, and discusses the organization of the course. Professor Blight offers some thoughts on the nature of history and the study of history, before moving into a discussion of the reasons for Americans' enduring fascination with the Civil War. The reasons include: the human passion for epics, Americans' fondness for redemption narratives, the Civil War as a moment of "racial reckoning," the fascination with loss and lost causes, interest in military history, and the search for the origins of the modern United States. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

Rick Atkinson: The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777: Author Rick Atkinson returns to the PMML to discuss his latest book titled The British Are Coming, which is the first volume of his new trilogy about the American Revolution.

Podcast episode

128 Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History: Historians often portray the American Revolution as an orderly, if violent, event that moved from British colonists’ high-minded ideas about freedom to American independence from Great Britain and the ratification of the Constitution of 1787. But...

Podcast episode

046 John Ferling, Whirlwind: The American Revolution & the War That Won It: Ben Franklin's World: A Podcast About Early American History

Podcast episode

Puritans and the Mayflower: Author and journalist Stephen Tomkins discusses the rise of Puritanism in England and explains how state persecution led some Puritans to embark on the Mayflower voyage to North America in 1620. Historyextra.com/podcast

Podcast episode

Inside Benjamin Franklin's House

Podcast episode

Pontiac's Rebellion: Native American tribes in the Great Lakes region fight British expansion and rule in their territory

Podcast episode

The Zealot and the Emancipator with H.W. Brands: Host Reed Galen is joined by Dr. H.W. Brands (Professor of History and Bestselling Author) to discuss the vastly different approaches John Brown and Abraham Lincoln took to confront the issue of slavery in their time and what parallels we can draw to...

Podcast episode

112 Mary Beth Norton, The Tea Crisis of 1773 (Doing History Revolution): On December 16, 1773, the colonists of Boston threw 342 chests of English East India Company tea into Boston Harbor, an act we remember as the “Boston Tea Party.” Have you ever wondered what drove the Bostonians to destroy the tea? Or whether they...

Podcast episode

Lecture 22 - Constitutional Crisis and Impeachment of a President: Professor Blight continues his discussion of the political history of Reconstruction. The central figure in the early phase of Reconstruction was President Andrew Johnson. Under Johnson's stewardship, southern whites held constitutional conventions throughout 1865, drafting new constitutions that outlawed slavery but changed little else. When the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress reassembled late in 1865, they put a stop to Johnson's leniency and inaugurated Radical (or Congressional) Reconstruction, a process that resulted in the immediate passage of the Civil Rights bill and the Fourteenth Amendment, and the eventual passage of four Reconstruction Acts. The Congressional elections in 1866 and Johnson's disastrous "Swing Around the Circle" speaking tour strengthened Radical control over Congress. Each step of the way, Johnson did everything he could to obstruct Congressional Reconstruction, setting the stage for his i

Podcast episode

What would Keynes do?: What the 20th century’s most influential economist can teach us about rebuilding the US economy

Podcast episode

American Nations by Colin Woodard (Part 1) - 0252: American Nations by Colin Woodard (Part 1)

Podcast episode

The Whiskey Rebellion

Podcast episode

Jefferson Cowie, "Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power" (Basic Books, 2022): An interview with Jefferson Cowie

Podcast episode

010 Don N. Hagist, British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution: Ben Franklin's World: A Podcast About Early American History

Podcast episode

‘Robert E. Lee: A Life’, with Dr. Allen Guelzo

Podcast episode

The 1968 Chicago Protests - The Battle of Michigan Avenue | 1

Podcast episode

War And The Individual: John Keegan considers the impact of battle on those who fight them.

Podcast episode

Lecture 24 - Retreat from Reconstruction: The Grant Era and Paths to "Southern Redemption": This lecture opens with a discussion of the myriad moments at which historians have declared an "end" to Reconstruction, before shifting to the myth and reality of "Carpetbag rule" in the Reconstruction South. Popularized by Lost Cause apologists and biased historians, this myth suggests that the southern governments of the Reconstruction era were dominated by unscrupulous and criminal Yankees who relied on the ignorant black vote to rob and despoil the innocent South. The reality, of course, diverges widely from this image. Among other accomplishments, the Radical state governments that came into existence after 1868 made important gains in African-American rights and public education. Professor Blight closes the lecture with the passage of the 15th Amendment, the waning radicalism of the Republican party after 1870, and the rise of white political terrorism across the South. Transcript Lecture

Podcast episode

Lecture 17 - Homefronts and Battlefronts: "Hard War" and the Social Impact of the Civil War: Professor Blight begins his lecture with a description of the sea change in Civil War scholarship heralded by the Social History revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Along with a focus on the experience of the common solider, women, and African Americans, a central component of this shift in scholarly emphasis was an increased interest in the effects of the war on the Union and Confederate home fronts. After suggesting some of the ways in which individual Americans experienced the war, Professor Blight moves to a discussion of the war's effect on industry and economics, North and South. The lecture concludes with a description of the increased activism of the federal government during the war, an activism that found expression in finance, agriculture, taxation, building railroads, and, most importantly, in emancipation. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

Lecture 3 - A Southern World View: The Old South and Proslavery Ideology: Professor Blight lectures on southern slavery. He makes a case for viewing the U.S. South as one of the five true "slave societies" in world history. He discusses the internal slave trade that moved thousands of slaves from the eastern seaboard to the cotton states of the Southwest between 1820 and 1860. Professor Blight then sketches the contents of the pro-slavery argument, including its biblical, historical, economic, cynical, and utopian aspects. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

Lecture 15 - Lincoln, Leadership, and Race: Emancipation as Policy: Professor Blight follows Robert E. Lee's army north into Maryland during the summer of 1862, an invasion that culminated in the Battle of Antietam, fought in September of 1862. In the wake of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, a document that changed the meaning of the war forever. Professor Blight suggests some of the ways in which Americans have attempted to come to grips with the enigmatic Lincoln, and argues that, in the end, it may be Lincoln's capacity for change that was his most important characteristic. The lecture concludes with the story of John Washington, a Virginia slave whose concerted action suggests the central role American slaves played in securing their own freedom. Transcript Lecture Page