
American Colossus
The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900
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Narrated by:
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Robertson Dean
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By:
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H. W. Brands
About this listen
In a grand-scale narrative history, the bestselling author of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize now captures the decades when capitalism was at its most unbridled and a few breathtakingly wealthy businessmen utterly transformed America from an agrarian economy to a world power. The years between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century saw the wholesale transformation of America from a land of small farmers and small businessmen into an industrial giant. Driven by unfathomably wealthy and powerful businessmen like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, armies of workers, both male and female, were harnessed to a new vision of massive industry. A society rooted in the soil became one based in cities, and legions of immigrants were drawn to American shores. What’s more, in accomplishing its revolution, capitalism threatened to eclipse American democracy. “What do I care about the law?” bellowed Cornelius Vanderbilt. “Hain’t I got the power?” He did, and with it he and the other capitalists reshaped every aspect of American life. In American Colossus, H.W. Brands portrays the emergence, in a remarkably short time, of a recognizably modern America. The capitalist revolution left not a single area or aspect of American life untouched. It roared across the South, wrenching that region from its feudal past and integrating the southern economy into the national one. It burst over the West, dictating the destruction of Native American economies and peoples, driving the exploitation of natural resources, and making the frontier of settlement a business frontier as well. It crashed across the urban landscape of the East and North, turning cities into engines of wealth and poverty, opulence and squalor. It swamped the politics of an earlier era, capturing one major party and half of the other, inspiring the creation of a third party and determining the issues over which all three waged some of the bitterest battles in American history. Brands’s spellbinding narrative beautifully depicts the oil gushers of western Pennsylvania, the rise, in Chicago, of the first skyscraper, the exploration of the Colorado River, the cattle drives of the West, and the early passionate sparks of union life. By 1900 the America he portrays is wealthier than ever, yet prosperity is precarious, inequality rampant, and democracy stretched thin. American Colossus is an unforgettable portrait of the years when the contest between capitalism and democracy was at its sharpest, and capitalism triumphed.
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Critic reviews
"Effectively, excerpts from the first-person accounts of Booker T. Washington, Black Elk, Jacob Riis, and others convey the drama of the time.... [A] fast-paced, engrossing narrative." (Publishers Weekly)
"Mr. Brands, a terrific writer who commands his material, handles this sprawling, complicated story with authority and panache. A book that might have been a worthy but boring tome turns out to be as close as serious history gets to a page turner....American Colossus is a first-rate overview of one of the most important periods in American history, one without which the American Century could not have happened." (John Steele Gordon, The New York Times)
"A great story . . . Serves up everything you might expect in a ripping yarn: murderous duels, savage Indian raids, equally savage counterattacks.”—Washington Post Book World“Old Hickory rides again in Brands’ elegantly written and carefully researched biography . . . A must-read!” (Douglas Brinkley, author of The Great Deluge, winner of the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award)
Featured Article: The Gilded Age in History and Fiction
While fans of Julian Fellowes’s Gilded Age may be gagging on the luxurious costumes and sumptuous sets, part of the fun is sorting out fact from fiction in the HBO period drama. With a mix of invented characters and actual historical figures—such as society queen Caroline Astor and African American newspaper editor and civil rights leader T. Thomas Fortune—enthusiasts have plenty of resources available so they can learn the truth about the extravagant era when wealthy railroad magnates and other arrivistes were upending late 19th-century New York City society and culture.
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Story
The dramatic story of the explosive 1894 clash of industry, labor, and government that shook the nation and marked a turning point for America. The Edge of Anarchy offers a vivid account of the greatest uprising of working people in American history. At the pinnacle of the Gilded Age, a boycott of Pullman sleeping cars by hundreds of thousands of railroad employees brought commerce to a standstill across much of the country. Famine threatened, riots broke out along the rail lines. Soon the US Army was on the march and gunfire rang from the streets of major cities.
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Wow! every workingman should read.
- By Calemos on 01-18-20
By: Jack Kelly
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The Half Has Never Been Told
- Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
- By: Edward E Baptist
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 19 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans tend to cast slavery as a pre-modern institution - the nation's original sin, perhaps, but isolated in time and divorced from America's later success. But to do so robs the millions who suffered in bondage of their full legacy. As historian Edward E. Baptist reveals in The Half Has Never Been Told, the expansion of slavery in the first eight decades after American independence drove the evolution and modernization of the United States.
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A must read for everyone.
- By S. P. Cooper on 03-18-22
By: Edward E Baptist
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Gotham
- A History of New York City to 1898
- By: Edwin G. Burrows, Mike Wallace
- Narrated by: Victor Bevine
- Length: 67 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In Gotham, Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace have produced a monumental work of history, one that ranges from the Indian tribes that settled in and around the island of Manna-hata, to the consolidation of the five boroughs into Greater New York in 1898. It is an epic narrative, a story as vast and as varied as the city it chronicles, and it underscores that the history of New York is the story of our nation. The events and people who crowd this audiobook guarantee that this is no mere local history. It is in fact a portrait of the heart and soul of America....
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THANK YOU!!!!!
- By Stephen F (SPFJR) on 09-29-18
By: Edwin G. Burrows, and others
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Jacksonland
- President Andrew Jackson, Cherokee Chief John Ross, and a Great American Land Grab
- By: Steve Inskeep
- Narrated by: Steve Inskeep
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Jacksonland is the thrilling narrative history of two men - President Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief John Ross - who led their respective nations at a crossroads of American history. Five decades after the Revolutionary War, the United States approached a constitutional crisis. At its center stood two former military comrades locked in a struggle that tested the boundaries of our fledgling democracy. Jacksonland is their story.
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Fantastic and Thoughtful
- By Elizabeth Westbrook on 05-05-16
By: Steve Inskeep
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Bound for Canaan
- The Epic Story of the Underground Railroad, America's First Civil Rights Movement
- By: Fergus Bordewich
- Narrated by: Peter J. Fernandez
- Length: 19 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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The Civil War brought to a climax the country's bitter division. But the beginnings of slavery's denouement can be traced to a courageous band of ordinary Americans, black and white, slave and free, who joined forces to create what would come to be known as the Underground Railroad, a movement that occupies as romantic a place in the nation's imagination as the Lewis and Clark expedition.
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The Heroic Missing Piece
- By Paul Frandano on 03-03-17
By: Fergus Bordewich
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A Different Mirror
- A History of Multicultural America
- By: Ronald Takaki
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 18 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Upon its first publication, A Different Mirror was hailed by critics and academics everywhere as a dramatic new retelling of our nation's past. Beginning with the colonization of the New World, it recounts the history of America in the voice of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States---Native Americans, African Americans, Jews, Irish Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and others---groups who helped create this country's rich mosaic culture.
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All mirrors distort
- By Michael on 04-02-17
By: Ronald Takaki
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Railroaded
- The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
- By: Richard White
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 23 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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The transcontinental railroads of the late 19th century were the first corporate behemoths. Their attempts to generate profits from proliferating debt sparked devastating panics in the US economy. Their dependence on public largess drew them into the corridors of power, initiating new forms of corruption. Their operations rearranged space and time, and remade the landscape of the West. As wheel and rail, car and coal, they opened new worlds of work and ways of life.
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Correcting the Myth of the Transcontinentals
- By Keith on 06-23-18
By: Richard White
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City of Dreams
- The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
- By: Tyler Anbinder
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 24 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Tyler Anbinder's story is one of innovators and artists, revolutionaries and rioters, staggering deprivation and soaring triumphs, all playing out against the powerful backdrop of New York City, at once ever changing and profoundly, permanently itself. City of Dreams provides a vivid sense of what New York looked like, sounded like, smelled like, and felt like over the centuries of its development and maturation into the city we know today.
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Even as a history, not engaging
- By Patrick Kelly on 12-03-16
By: Tyler Anbinder
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The First Congress
- How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government
- By: Fergus M. Bordewich
- Narrated by: Sean Runnette
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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The First Congress was the most important in US history, says prizewinning author and historian Fergus Bordewich, because it established how our government would actually function. Had it failed - as many at the time feared it would - it's possible that the United States as we know it would not exist today.
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Compelling
- By Jean on 03-05-18
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Only Yesterday
- An Informal History of the 1920s
- By: Frederick Lewis Allen
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In this span between armistice and depression, Americans were kicking up their heels, but they were also bringing about major changes in the social and political structure of their country. Only Yesterday is a fond, witty, penetrating biography of this restless decade, a delightful reminiscence for those who can remember and a fascinating firsthand look for those who've only heard.
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Loved this book
- By Matthew M. Kayes on 06-11-07
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Patriotic Treason
- John Brown and the Soul of America
- By: Evan Carton
- Narrated by: Michael Prichard
- Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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John Brown is a lightning rod of history. Yet he is poorly understood and most commonly described in stereotypes, as a madman, martyr, or enigma. Not until Patriotic Treason has a biography or history brought him so fully to life, in scintillating prose and moving detail, making his life and legacy - and the staggering sacrifices he made for his ideals - fascinatingly relevant to today's issues of social justice and to defining the line between activism and terrorism.
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A Jarring Reminder of Antebellum America
- By Ronald A. Nelson on 12-22-06
By: Evan Carton
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A People's History of the United States
- By: Howard Zinn
- Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
- Length: 34 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools - with its emphasis on great men in high places - to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace. Known for its lively, clear prose as well as its scholarly research, A People's History of the United States is the only volume to tell America's story from the point of view of - and in the words of - America's women, factory workers, African-Americans, Native Americans, the working poor, and immigrant laborers.
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Amateur hour in the production booth
- By Thomas on 11-09-10
By: Howard Zinn
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Diamonds, Gold, and War
- The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa
- By: Martin Meredith
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced upon the world’s richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land. The result was the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and the devastation of the Boer republics.
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Engrossing story on the evolution of the modern SA
- By Cary on 05-23-14
By: Martin Meredith
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The American Experiment
- By: James MacGregor Burns
- Narrated by: Mark Ashby
- Length: 88 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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James MacGregor Burns’s stunning trilogy of American history, spanning the birth of the Constitution to the final days of the Cold War. In these three volumes, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James MacGregor Burns chronicles with depth and narrative panache the most significant cultural, economic, and political events of American history.
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American History ABCs
- By Michael on 06-16-15
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