Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction

Audiobook

Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory

Audiobook

The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition

Audiobook

Confederate Reckoning: Power and Politics in the Civil War South

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War

Audiobook

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

Audiobook

Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson

Audiobook

Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence

Audiobook

Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow (Scholastic Focus)

Audiobook

The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation

Audiobook

Redemption: The Last Battle of the Civil War

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

White Freedom: The Racial History of an Idea

Audiobook

The War after the War: A New History of Reconstruction

Audiobook

The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South

Audiobook

Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory

Audiobook

Waiting 'Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America

Audiobook

The Union War

Audiobook

The Cause: The American Revolution and its Discontents, 1773-1783

Audiobook

Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

Audiobook

Make Good the Promises: Reclaiming Reconstruction and Its Legacies

Audiobook

Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring

Audiobook

Black Power and the American Myth: 50th Anniversary Edition

Audiobook

American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World

Audiobook

1919, The Year of Racial Violence: How African Americans Fought Back

Audiobook

Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America

Audiobook

April 1865: The Month That Saved America

Audiobook

Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War

Audiobook

Hell's Princess: The Mystery of Belle Gunness, Butcher of Men

Audiobook

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Audiobook

All the Sinners Bleed: A Novel

Audiobook

The Book of Five Rings

Audiobook

The Secret History of the World

Audiobook

Demon Copperhead: A Novel

Audiobook

Razorblade Tears: A Novel

Audiobook

Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present

Audiobook

The Mysterious Case of Rudolf Diesel: Genius, Power, and Deception on the Eve of World War I

Audiobook

Who Cooked the Last Supper?: The Women's History of the World

Audiobook

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Audiobook

The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

Knowing What We Know: The Transmission of Knowledge: From Ancient Wisdom to Modern Magic

Audiobook

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

Audiobook

The Korean War: A History

Audiobook

The Overstory

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

Leave the World Behind: A Novel

Audiobook

Small Mercies: A Novel

Audiobook

On Palestine

Audiobook

The Endurance

Audiobook

Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy

Audiobook

Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

Audiobook

Mary Magdalene: Women, the Church, and the Great Deception

Audiobook

77 Days of February: Living and Dying in Ukraine, Told by the Nation’s Own Journalists

Audiobook

Astor: The Rise and Fall of an American Fortune

Audiobook

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States

Audiobook

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

Audiobook

The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland

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

The Essential Kerner Commission Report: In 1968, the Kerner Commission wrote, "white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto." Here's how they reached a conclusion that still rings true today.

Podcast episode

‘White Space, Black Hood’ with Sheryll Cashin: Residential segregation and unequal allocation of resources continues to play a profound role in areas of concentrated poverty, and conversely, high opportunity. Georgetown law professor Sheryll Cashin has spent decades studying housing and how geography is central to American inequality. In “White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality,” Cashin traces the history of anti-Black residential caste, which she says manifests in three forms: boundary maintenance, opportunity hoarding and stereotype-driven surveillance. She joins to unpack her findings and to share strategies for abolishing state-sanctioned practices that further perpetuate inequities.

Podcast episode

Introducing ‘1619,’ a New York Times Audio Series

Podcast episode

Cruelty: the point: Adam Serwer joins Matt to talk about his new book, the racial politics of Trump and the GOP, and the Reconstruction-era problems we face anew today

Podcast episode

Bacon’s Rebellion, Part 1

Podcast episode

BONUS: Eric Foner and Henry Louis Gates Jr. on Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction

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

042 Heather Cox Richardson, A History of the Republican Party: Ben Franklin's World: A Podcast About Early American History

Podcast episode

A Slow Civil War with Jeff Sharlet: Host Reed Galen is joined by journalist and New York Times bestselling author, Jeff Sharlet. Jeff shares scenes from his travels across the United States which exemplify the convergence of MAGA, religion, militias, and fascism. The aftermath of...

Podcast episode

Lecture 6 - Expansion and Slavery: Legacies of the Mexican War and the Compromise of 1850: In this lecture, Professor Blight discusses some of the conflicts, controversies, and compromises that led up to the Civil War. After analyzing Frederick Douglass's 1852 Fourth of July speech and the inherent conflict between American slavery and American freedom, the lecture moves into a lengthy discussion of the war with Mexico in the 1840s. Professor Blight explains why northerners and southerners made "such a fuss" over the issue of slavery's expansion into the western territories. The lecture ends with the crisis over California's admission to statehood and the Compromise of 1850. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

The Klan and Reconstruction with Kidada Williams: The Reconstruction era is a pivotal point in our nation’s history and often misconstrued. What many hoped to be a time of promise and racial equality after the Civil war turned into a period marked by terror and violence against Black people and widespread efforts to undermine and stop Black progress. In her new book, “I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction,” Professor Kidada E. Williams of Wayne State University reexamines this period and shares the stories of those who fought against oppression. Williams joins WITHpod to discuss her new book and the impact of racial trauma on future generations.

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

Reconstruction 101: Progress and Backlash: Just months after the Civil War ended, former Confederates had regained political footholds in Washington, D.C. In her overview of Reconstruction, Kate Masur notes how—in the face of evolving, post-slavery white supremacy—Black people claimed...

Podcast episode

How the Word is Passed with Clint Smith: What we call history isn't a fixed thing; it's a narrative, contested and fought over, changing over time. Right now, the United States is in the midst of a massive historical battle over its own narrative, specifically the legacy of slavery and race in America. The backlash to that fight is spilling into public policy as Republican state legislatures push to regulate the way students are taught about the founding of our country. In Clint Smith's new book "How The Word is Passed", Smith studies our understanding of slavery through the stories we tell of it. He travelled to the cemeteries and plantations and prisons home to these stories to see up close how they reckon with - or fail to reckon with - their own relationship to our country's legacy.

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

The Other Slavery – w/ Andrés Reséndez: A hundred years before the first ship carrying enslaved Africans arrived in Virginia, Europeans introduced the commercial practice of enslavement in “The New World.” And for the next 400 years, millions of Indigenous people throughout the Americas...

Podcast episode

A Low, Dishonest Decade: The Right in the 1990s (w/ Nicole Hemmer): Matt and Sam talk to Nicole Hemmer about her new book, Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s.

Podcast episode

'The Divider' looks at Trump's years in office through the eyes of his aides

Podcast episode

Inside A Jim Crow-Era Asylum

Podcast episode

‘Gangsters of Capitalism’ with Jonathan Katz: Smedley Butler was one of the most decorated warfighters in history. From an early age, “The Fighting Quaker” played a pivotal role in America’s path to global power. Yet in retirement, Butler turned into a warrior against war, imperialism and big business, declaring that he was a “racketeer for capitalism." Award-winning author Jonathan Katz writes about his life in a new book, “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire.” Katz joins to discuss efforts throughout history to establish a fascist dictatorship, parallels between the January 6th insurrection and an attempted coup in 1934 and the role of globalism in capitalism.

Podcast episode

Lecture 2 - Southern Society: Slavery, King Cotton, and Antebellum America's "Peculiar" Region: Professor Blight offers a number of approaches to the question of southern distinctiveness. The lecture offers a survey of that manner in which commentators--American, foreign, northern, and southern--have sought to make sense of the nature of southern society and southern history. The lecture analyzes the society and culture of the Old South, with special emphasis on the aspects of southern life that made the region distinct from the antebellum North. The most lasting and influential sources of Old South distinctiveness, Blight suggests, were that society's anti-modernism, its emphasis on honor, and the booming slave economy that developed in the South from the 1820s to the 1860s. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

‘1619,’ Episode 5: The Land of Our Fathers, Part 1

Podcast episode

Lecture 21 - Andrew Johnson and the Radicals: A Contest over the Meaning of Reconstruction: In this lecture, Professor Blight begins his engagement with Reconstruction. Reconstruction, Blight suggests, might best be understood as an extended referendum on the meaning of the Civil War. Even before the war's end, various constituencies in the North attempted to control the shape of the post-war Reconstruction of the South. In late 1863, President Abraham Lincoln offered his lenient "Ten Percent Plan." Six months later, Congressional Republicans concerned by Lincoln's charity rallied behind the more radical provisions of the Wade-Davis Bill. Despite their struggle for control over Reconstruction, Congressional Radicals and President Lincoln managed to work together on two vital pieces of Reconstruction legislation in the first months of 1865--the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery in the United States, and the Freedmen's Bureau bill. Transcript Lecture Page

Podcast episode

Jonathan S. Holloway, "The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans" (Oxford UP, 2021): An interview with Jonathan S. Holloway

Podcast episode

Jonathan S. Holloway, "The Cause of Freedom: A Concise History of African Americans" (Oxford UP, 2021): An interview with Jonathan S. Holloway

Podcast episode

Donald F. Johnson, "Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020): An interview with Donald F. Johnson

Podcast episode

Joseph J. Ellis, "The Cause: The American Revolution and Its Discontents, 1773-1783" (Liveright, 2021): An interview with Joseph J. Ellis

Podcast episode

Ed Larson: Liberty and Slavery in the Birth of Our Nation: Pulitzer Prize-winner Ed Larson returns to The Commonwealth Club with a revealing look at how the twin strands of liberty and slavery were joined in the nation’s founding.

Podcast episode

Daniel Y. Kim, "The Intimacies of Conflict: Cultural Memory and the Korean War" (NYU Press, 2020): An interview with Daniel Y. Kim