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From Colony to Superpower
- US Foreign Relations Since 1776
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 40 hrs and 41 mins
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Publisher's summary
A finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, this prize-winning and critically acclaimed history uses foreign relations as the lens through which to tell the story of America's dramatic rise from 13 disparate colonies huddled along the Atlantic coast to the world's greatest superpower.
Robert Fass narrates George C Herring’s stunning history of successes and sometimes tragic failures with calm engagement, capturing the fast-paced narrative that illuminates the central importance of foreign relations to the existence and survival of the nation, and highlights its ongoing impact on the lives of ordinary citizens.
From Colony to Superpower is the most recent volume in the peerless Oxford History of the United States, which was described by the Atlantic Monthly as “state of the art” and “the most distinguished series in American historical scholarship.”
Please note: The individual volumes of the series have not been published in historical order. From Colony to Superpower is number XII in The Oxford History of the United States.
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- Unabridged
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World War I and the Russian Revolution together shaped the 20th century in profound ways. In The End of Tsarist Russia, acclaimed scholar Dominic Lieven connects for the first time the two events, providing both a history of the First World War's origins from a Russian perspective and an international history of why the revolution happened.
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A good book done in by bad narration.
- By James on 05-25-16
By: Dominic Lieven
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This Vast Southern Empire
- Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy
- By: Matthew Karp
- Narrated by: Tom Zingarelli
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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For proslavery leaders like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis, the 19th-century world was torn between two hostile forces: a rising movement against bondage and an Atlantic plantation system that was larger and more productive than ever before. In this great struggle, Southern statesmen saw the United States as slavery's most powerful champion. Overcoming traditional qualms about a strong central government, slaveholding leaders harnessed the power of the state to defend slavery abroad.
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Excellent Listen
- By NCmom on 09-03-17
By: Matthew Karp
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Making the Future
- Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance
- By: Noam Chomsky
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Making the Future presents more than 50 concise and persuasively argued commentaries on U.S. politics and policies, written between 2007 and 2011. Taken together, Chomsky's essays present a powerful counter-narrative to official accounts of the major political events of the past four years: the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the U.S. presidential race; the ascendancy of China; Latin America's leftward turn; the threat of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea; Israel's invasion of Gaza and more.
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Fifty-Two Reasons to Listen to Chomsky
- By Susie on 01-04-13
By: Noam Chomsky
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On China
- By: Henry Kissinger
- Narrated by: Nicholas Hormann
- Length: 20 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In this sweeping and insightful history, Henry Kissinger turns for the first time at book length to a country he has known intimately for decades and whose modern relations with the West he helped shape. On China illuminates the inner workings of Chinese diplomacy during such pivotal events as the initial encounters between China and tight line modern European powers, the formation and breakdown of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the Korean War, and Richard Nixon’s historic trip to Beijing.
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Another History of China
- By Elton on 09-23-11
By: Henry Kissinger
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The Arabs
- A History
- By: Eugene Rogan
- Narrated by: Derek Perkins
- Length: 27 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context for the first time. Tracing five centuries of Arab history, Rogan reveals that there was an age when the Arabs set the rules for the rest of the world. Today, however, the Arab world's sense of subjection to external powers carries vast consequences for both the region and Westerners who attempt to control it.
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Superb Book About the Arab World
- By Nostromo on 05-29-16
By: Eugene Rogan
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Interventions
- By: Noam Chomsky
- Narrated by: Peter Johnson
- Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Interventions, by Noam Chomsky, is getting new press after the Pentagon banned the book from Guantanamo Bay's prison library. Interventions is Noam Chomsky at his best. Not since his all-time best-selling title, 9/11, published in the Open Media series in 2001, have readers and listeners had a timely, short, affordable Chomsky. Unlike 9/11, Interventions is a writerly work - a series of more than 30 tightly argued essays aimed at various aspects of U.S. power and politics in the post-9/11 world. While critical of U.S. military interventions around the globe, each piece in the book is in itself an intellectual intervention.
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Chomsky on Fire
- By Susie on 01-09-13
By: Noam Chomsky
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Magnificent Delusions
- Pakistan, the United States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding
- By: Husain Haqqani
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 14 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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A character-driven history that describes the bizarrely ill-suited alliance between America and Pakistan, written by a uniquely insightful participant: Pakistan's former ambassador to the US. The relationship between America and Pakistan is based on mutual incomprehension, and always has been. Pakistan - to American eyes - has gone from being a stabilizing friend to an essential military ally to a seedbed of terror.
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It it Delusions or Sleeping with the Enemy
- By Shah Alam on 01-28-14
By: Husain Haqqani
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Diplomacy
- By: Henry Kissinger
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 37 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Moving from a sweeping overview of history to blow-by-blow accounts of his negotiations with world leaders, Henry Kissinger describes how the art of diplomacy has created the world in which we live, and how America's approach to foreign affairs has always differed vastly from that of other nations. Brilliant, controversial, and profoundly incisive, Diplomacy stands as the culmination of a lifetime of diplomatic service and scholarship. It is a must-listen for anyone concerned with the forces that have shaped our world today and will impact upon it tomorrow.
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Great foreign policy overview!
- By Mikhail on 02-02-20
By: Henry Kissinger
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The Jungle Grows Back
- America and Our Imperiled World
- By: Robert Kagan
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 5 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Recent years have brought deeply disturbing developments around the globe. American sentiment seems to be leaning increasingly toward withdrawal in the face of such disarray. In this powerful, urgent essay, Robert Kagan elucidates the reasons why American withdrawal would be the worst possible response, based as it is on a fundamental and dangerous misreading of the world. Like a jungle that keeps growing back after being cut down, the world has always been full of dangerous actors who, left unchecked, possess the desire and ability to make things worse.
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Out of date: covid, Trump nobel nominations etc
- By David on 11-13-18
By: Robert Kagan
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How Wars End
- Why We Always Fight the Last Battle
- By: Gideon Rose
- Narrated by: Gideon Rose
- Length: 12 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1991, the United States Army trounced the Iraqi army in battle only to stumble blindly into postwar turmoil. Then in 2003 the United States did it again. How could this happen? How could the strongest power in modern history fight two wars against the same opponent in just over a decade, win lightning victories both times, and yet still be woefully unprepared for the aftermath? Because Americans always forget the political aspects of war.
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Excellent book
- By Luis on 11-04-10
By: Gideon Rose
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Helps the dots of history to today.
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What listeners say about From Colony to Superpower
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Theo Horesh
- 02-27-13
Sweeping, Masterful, and Magisterial
This book has all the ingredients needed to make it a classic in American history. It is sweeping, covering the whole of United States history, the foreign policy of just about every President, and every major and minor American intervention abroad.
It is deep, delving into the doctrines, strategies, and personal tendencies that animated American foreign policy. It is not just some rehash of the working out of policy between the President and Secretary of State; rather, the book presents the complex and often baffling interactions amongst a wide array of characters both foreign and domestic. In this sense, it gives the inside scoop.
This is also an extraordinarily well-researched book. Herring appears to have mastered the material, twisting and turning it around, speculating on events from every available angle. In this sense, From Colony to Superpower feels like the last word. It is authoritative, transcending and including the views of other historians and foreign policy analysts.
Most important to me, it didn't just cover the same old tired conflicts: the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq. While it was long enough to go into great depth on these conflicts, it also penetrated into the causes and consequences of the Spanish-American War, early twentieth century interventions in Central America, our overturning of the democratically elected governments of Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973, and the impact of Vietnam on Cambodia. But better still, these seldom mentioned, but nevertheless momentous, events were contextualized within the wider contexts of the Cold War, American geo-strategic interests, and the personal goals and values of various Presidential administrations.
Starting in the early twentieth-century, Herring begins to systematically evaluate the foreign policy successes and failures of each American President. He is a deep and serious enough thinker that you should come away unsure of where he sits on the political spectrum.
This is a very academic book, in the best sense. It is serious, deep, earnest, objective, comprehensive, and lacking in narrative. This makes it a poor book to take to the gym. It requires some concentration. But it also makes this a vastly more rewarding and quite simply a better book than most. Why waste our lives listening to books when we can be breathing deep and loving the world around us if not to learn and better understand the world? Too much history is mere entertainment, playing to our prejudices and, in the process, skewing our understanding of world-historical events
Since any comprehensive view of American foreign policy must necessarily include numerous interventions Americans would rather forget, a book like this can be used as ammunition from critics of American foreign policy. It can also be used as a set of cautionary tails. Further, it can be used to better understand the American Presidency. And surprising to me, having studied numerous other nation-states in great depth, since the United States is such a global power, the book can be used to help you better understand every other country where we have intervened (and this is probably more than you think).
Listening to this book will make you a better citizen insofar as it will allow you to better evaluate any potential future interventions in which we may engage. If we are to avoid making stupid mistakes abroad, we need citizens who know what is going on in the world. And if getting to know your country means getting to love it more, reading a book like this will make you a better American. Certainly, the world would love Americans more if we knew some more of this history.
I hope you get as much from this book as I did. :-)
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13 people found this helpful
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- Doug
- 06-13-12
The Rise and Stall of the American Empire
This is the second longest book I've read through Audible and it did that special thing...it made me THINK.
I believe this book began as a research project during the second Bush administration because the author....like many of us.....had concerns about American behavior after 9/11 and began looking for precedents in American history. What he found in his journey became a monumental analysis of ALL U.S. foreign policy since the beginning.
He viewed our founding fathers as kind of ???proto-Twentieth-Century-ists,??? which I found fascinating. Unlike most historical books, this one managed to capture each presidential administration through the lens of problem-solving America???s own unique relationship with other nations and people. Our collective and individual decisions, for better or worse, all seemed to be leading up to today???or to ???The American Moment.??? The end of the 20th Century was simply the actualization of American principles worldwide. The race ended. We won.
But the book doesn???t take the time to flesh out America???s past for the fun of it. The book???s conclusion demands the most important question: what next? When the audio book says ???Audible hopes you have enjoyed this book,??? I instinctively knew that it???s wasn't really over. There will be other presidents and a continuation to this story whether I like it or not.
I finished the book feeling as though the author successfully highlighted something important. Perhaps the time HAS come for new ideas...ones as powerful as those that led generations of unrelated people to come and build an unparalleled civilization.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Mark Grannis
- 02-27-15
Increasingly biased after 1900
I thought I was learning a lot from this survey until we got to the eras I already know pretty well. Then it went farther and farther off the rails. Did you know that the Bay of Pigs was Ike's fault? That Détente was a Kennedy-Johnson initiative rather than Nixon and Kissinger? That Iran-Contra was a much more significant part of Reagan's foreign policy than his Cold War politics? And so on.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Teadrinker
- 08-04-13
Sorry I Bought It
I need long books to listen to while I'm exercising and I like history so this looked good. Unfortunately, the author is so biased against the US that it's hard to listen to. I don't mind other viewpoints but this isn't a viewpoint, it's a rant. A really LONG rant.
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9 people found this helpful
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- Catherine Spiller
- 09-12-17
More effort to say that decisions were good or bad than to describe them.
The, as yet incomplete, series that this book is a part of is generally exemplary in giving equal space to the more and the less popular periods of American history; books pretty consistently cover thirty year periods.
Herring has talked in interviews about how much he was thinking about Iraq when he wrote this book, and boy does it show. The first two and a half books of the Oxford history take America up to independence. These books receive no counterpart pages in this; "From Colony to Superpower" includes the superpower part, but not the colony. In general, events that can be used to talk about Iraq get a lot of space, which means that the first century and a bit he does cover goes by quickly.
While the superlative volumes of the series at its best do include value judgments, this book repeatedly devotes three or even four sentences in close proximity to describing Herring's view on the correct policy (often in the form of deriding the intelligence or education of those who disagreed with him; it appears from this volume that no intelligent or moral people were on the wrong side of historical foreign policy debates, no hucksters and charlatans on the right side).
Given the degree to which details are often smoothed over, this is not because he had space to spare.
We are told that the Afghan war was important, for instance, in the context of deriding Bush for Iraq, but we receive no description of the importance of Afghanistan. The degree to which this position mirrored the Obama speeches at the time may just be coincidence, but, Wilson and Vietnam aside, it falls into a general pattern of Democrats being uniformly correct in their foreign policy positions. The decision not to intervene more in the Chinese Civil War, for instance, is not a trade off that later saw America pay a high price in Korea (to say nothing of the price paid by China in the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution). Rather, this was a struggle between the noble Truman and villainous and ignorant Republicans.
To put it another way, the language used is that appropriate to the OUP, but the substance is that of the Victorian children's histories parodied in 1066 And All That.
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7 people found this helpful
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- Bob
- 05-31-11
Interesting overview of US system.
I found this title to be an interesting overview of the US political systems operations over the past 200 years or so. I did not find much of the content revelationary, but its a great single source of information of most of this counties major historical events in the international arena. Gives perspective around the many events that were taugnt in abstract when I was in school. Maybe this should have been my textbook instead! I would have seen the forest instead of the trees.
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6 people found this helpful
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- James
- 06-27-15
Lost credibility
At times insightful but mostly pedestrian review of US diplomatic history. The book was average until the Bush Bash at the end with no more analysis than Obama campaign talking points and liberal media quotations. The poor level of analysis of the Bush administration damaged the credibility of the remainder of the book and made me wish I had not wasted my time.
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- Wendy Solovy
- 06-27-15
major disappointment
What would have made From Colony to Superpower better?
It was a very good read, er, listen right up to FDR. Then all of a sudden style changed. Went from telling facts about past Presidents to sickly defending FDR, trashing Truman and others. Could not even finish it. If he would have stuck to reporting events as he did in all the previous chapters without interjecting his personal opinion and compulsive need to defend FDR I might have been able to finish it. Glossed over the Depression, etc.
What could George C. Herring have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?
Kept his personal defense of FDR out of it. He should have continued his style of reportingnot defending. Another FDR aapologist.
Which scene was your favorite?
Describing the Republican expansion of the land mass from the point of the different time periods and world events that gave rise to unique opportunities to expand the nation.
What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?
Awestruck for what early administrations went through, disappointed with his reporting of the early to mid 20th Century.
Any additional comments?
Don't waste you money on this one.
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- Andrew
- 01-20-14
A Thoughtful History Of U.S. Foreign Policy
What did you like best about this story?
I really enjoyed the parts about our foreign policy in the 1800's that aren't as well known. The author's discussion of the Spanish American War was very interesting.
Any additional comments?
A good listen overall. The only issue I had was that I felt the author was more biased as the end of the book approached. His views of Kissinger were very harsh.
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- Christine A. Haimann
- 09-13-11
Was a bit of a slog... so hang in there worth it!
IF you want the full gamut of US foreign policy since we threw out the Brits (yikes I am one of them!) well here it is in all its glorious detail. Make sure you listen on long trips, it will help pass the time and is full of detail. Enjoy
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