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The Story of America
- Essays on Origins
- Narrated by: Colleen Devine
- Length: 10 hrs and 44 mins
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Publisher's summary
In The Story of America, Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore investigates American origin stories - from John Smith's account of the founding of Jamestown in 1607 to Barack Obama's 2009 inaugural address - to show how American democracy is bound up with the history of print. Over the centuries, Americans have read and written their way into a political culture of ink and type.
Part civics primer, part cultural history, The Story of America excavates the origins of everything from the paper ballot and the Constitution to the I.O.U. and the dictionary. Along the way it presents fresh readings of Benjamin Franklin's Way to Wealth, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, and "Paul Revere's Ride" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as well as histories of lesser-known genres, including biographies of presidents, novels of immigrants, and accounts of the Depression.
From past to present, Lepore argues, Americans have wrestled with the idea of democracy by telling stories. In this thoughtful and provocative book, Lepore offers at once a history of origin stories and a meditation on storytelling itself.
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What listeners say about The Story of America
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jim
- 08-31-13
A Fun Read on Historical Subjects
This thoroughly enjoyable book is a collection of essays previously published in New Yorker magazine. The text is a jumble of subjects Lepore seems to have bumped into while professing at Harvard, then turned into articles targeted for popular consumption paid for by a venerable magazine. Subjects vary widely: Edgar Allan Poe, the history of voting, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, debtor’s prisons, Kit Carson, presentation of the U.S. in school plays, and some others. Despite being popular history, Lepore did research on all of them and has her subjects in hand. She writes drolly with good, insightful metaphors—both her own and others’. For example: In the pantheon of American “superhero” Founding Fathers, she writes, Tom Paine is a lesser demigod only made use of occasionally, like Aquaman. Another example: she quotes farmer/ex-Revolutionary soldier William Manning in the 1790s: “It [the Constitution] was made like a Fiddle, with but few Strings, but so that the ruling Majority could play any tune upon it they please.” Surprisingly, her book is free of political bias, a seeming prerequisite for a person who 1) has a Ph.D. in American Studies, and 2) chairs the history department at Harvard. I scrutinize history books assiduously, just waiting for some injected political nonsense to appear and ruin them so I can grind my teeth. I had nary an objection to Lepore’s book. Want to read a well written, entertaining collection of informative historical essays, read well by a narrator? Here is one worth the price.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Sheila K.
- 01-05-21
Essential Essays on America’s Origins
These “ Stories of America” are eye- opening, informative and entertaining. I love learning “ the inside scoop” on our country and Jill Lepore gave me much to ponder, say an inner “ so that’s how it was.” For lovers of American
History, I suggest adding this to your reading list!
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- Karen
- 01-08-20
Such A Disappointment!
Horrible narrator (so nasal she makes the hair on my neck stand up) and much drivel mixed in with a little interesting information. I had two US history titles on my wish list and I definitely picked the wrong one.
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The Secret History of Wonder Woman
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she has also has a secret history. Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has uncovered an astonishing trove of documents, including the never-before-seen private papers of William Moulton Marston, Wonder Woman's creator.
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Narration ruined it for me
- By Julia on 11-09-14
By: Jill Lepore
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The Name of War
- King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Bernadette Dunne
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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King Philip's War, the excruciating racial war - colonists against Indians - that erupted in New England in 1675, was, in proportion to population, the bloodiest in American history. Some even argued that the massacres and outrages on both sides were too horrific to "deserve the name of a war". Telling the story of what may have been the bitterest of American conflicts, and its reverberations over the centuries, Lepore has enabled us to see how the ways in which we remember past events are as important in their effect on our history as were the events themselves.
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Seriously ??
- By TeddyDog on 01-31-23
By: Jill Lepore
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If Then
- How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 10 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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The Simulmatics Corporation, founded in 1959, mined data, targeted voters, accelerated news, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge - decades before Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Cambridge Analytica. Silicon Valley likes to imagine that it has no past, but the scientists of Simulmatics are the long-dead grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. Borrowing from psychological warfare, they used computers to predict and direct human behavior, deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Cambridge, and Saigon.
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?
- By Andrew Weymouth on 01-03-21
By: Jill Lepore
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The Whites of Their Eyes
- The Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Emily Zeller
- Length: 5 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Americans have always put the past to political ends. The Union laid claim to the Revolution - so did the Confederacy. Civil rights leaders said they were the true sons of liberty - so did Southern segregationists. This book tells the story of the centuries-long struggle over the meaning of the nation's founding, including the battle waged by the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and evangelical Christians to "take back America".
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Fantastic, well researched and even handed
- By MF on 03-09-15
By: Jill Lepore
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New York Burning
- Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Beth McDonald
- Length: 7 hrs and 30 mins
- Abridged
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Over a few weeks in 1741, 10 fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. Tried and convicted before the colony's Supreme Court, 13 black men were burned at the stake and 17 were hanged. Four whites, the alleged ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged, and seven more were pardoned on condition that they never set foot in New York again.
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Interesting
- By Phillip Goodson on 05-15-09
By: Jill Lepore
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The Patriots
- Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the Making of America
- By: Winston Groom
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 10 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In this masterful narrative, Winston Groom brings his signature storytelling panache to the tale of our nation's most fascinating founding fathers - Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams - painting a vivid picture of the improbable events, bold ideas, and extraordinary characters who created the United States of America.
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For newbies or history buffs
- By SBR72 on 06-06-21
By: Winston Groom
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Book of Ages
- The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 11 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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From one of our most accomplished and widely admired historians, a revelatory portrait of Benjamin Franklin' s youngest sister and a history of history itself. Like her brother, Jane Franklin was a passionate reader, a gifted writer, and an astonishingly shrewd political commentator.
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Women during and after the Revolution
- By Robyn on 04-19-18
By: Jill Lepore
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The Mansion of Happiness
- A History of Life and Death
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Renowned Harvard scholar and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore has composed a strikingly original, ingeniously conceived, and beautifully crafted history of American ideas about life and death from before the cradle to beyond the grave. How does life begin? What does it mean? What happens when we die? “All anyone can do is ask,” Lepore writes. “That’s why any history of ideas about life and death has to be, like this book, a history of curiosity.” As much a meditation on the present as an excavation of the past, The Mansion of Happiness is delightful.
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Disappointing
- By Sean on 06-25-12
By: Jill Lepore
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The Constitution of Knowledge
- A Defense of Truth
- By: Jonathan Rauch
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In this pathbreaking book, Jonathan Rauch reaches back to the parallel 18th-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” - our social system for turning disagreement into truth. By explicating the Constitution of Knowledge and probing the war on reality, Rauch arms defenders of truth with a clearer understanding of what they must protect, why they must do - and how they can do it.
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A really good book
- By Will Blakey on 06-25-21
By: Jonathan Rauch
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Joe Gould's Teeth
- By: Jill Lepore
- Narrated by: Jill Lepore
- Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Joe Gould, a madman, believed he was the most brilliant historian of the 20th century. So did some of his friends, a group of modernist writers and artists that included E. E. Cummings, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound. Gould began his life's work before the First World War, announcing that he intended to write down nearly everything anyone ever said to him. "I am trying to preserve as much detail as I can about the normal life of everyday people," he explained, because "as a rule, history does not deal with such small fry."
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Fascinating & disturbing true story
- By Nevsus on 04-06-19
By: Jill Lepore
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Myth America
- Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past
- By: Kevin M. Kruse, Julian E. Zelizer
- Narrated by: Allan Aquino, Maleah Woodley, Todd Menesses, and others
- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The United States is in the grip of a crisis of bad history. Distortions of the past promoted in the conservative media have led large numbers of Americans to believe in fictions over facts, making constructive dialogue impossible and imperiling our democracy. In Myth America, Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer have assembled an all-star team of fellow historians to push back against this misinformation.
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Right Wing Bashing book!! Aka a History Book
- By amy on 02-08-23
By: Kevin M. Kruse, and others
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The Tyranny of Merit
- What's Become of the Common Good?
- By: Michael J. Sandel
- Narrated by: Michael J. Sandel
- Length: 11 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The world-renowned philosopher and author of the best-selling Justice explores the central question of our time: What has become of the common good? World-renowned philosopher Michael J. Sandel argues that to overcome the crises that are upending our world, we must rethink the attitudes toward success and failure that have accompanied globalization and rising inequality. Sandel shows the hubris a meritocracy generates among the winners and the harsh judgment it imposes on those left behind, and traces the dire consequences across a wide swath of American life.
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Enlightening
- By Robert McIntosh on 09-18-20
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Profiles in Ignorance
- How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber
- By: Andy Borowitz
- Narrated by: Andy Borowitz
- Length: 8 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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