Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: Daniel Houle
Unabridged: 1 hr 57 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 10/05/2021
The fight for civil rights was at the forefront of inspirational, high-octane movements that took 20th century America by storm. It was a long time coming, to say the least, and yet, while some headway was made, progress was difficult and painfully slow. The historic advancements achieved during the Reconstruction Era were reversed by the Jim Crow law, a hideous set of statutes that enforced racial segregation. Although some of the most “progressive” northern states outwardly opposed those laws, black civilians and veterans alike who resided in these liberal states were still regarded as second-class citizens whose occupations were limited to farming, factory work, domestic service, and other low-wage jobs.
Time and again, black Americans had no choice but to take to the streets and demand their rights. It was only through the resilience of the black community, and the powerful, peaceful protests they mobilized that they were finally granted voting rights and equal employment opportunities as archaic segregation laws were formally dismantled. Sadly, not all Americans celebrated these momentous milestones for minorities, which were long overdue, and discrimination still reared its ugly head in many forms.
One of the most common complaints minorities had centered on the use of police brutality, an issue that remains at the forefront of the conversation today. While protests emerged after the death of George Floyd in 2020, perhaps the most notorious example of police brutality in modern American history was the beating of Rodney King, whose arrest was caught on video. The trial that followed and the acquittal of the police officers who attacked him touched off violence, much of which was captured on video and broadcast around the globe.
Although Apollo 11’s successful mission to the Moon is seen as the culmination of the Space Race, and the Apollo program remains NASA’s most famous, one of the space agency’s most successful endeavors came a few years later. In fac...
While the period from 1945-1955 was the longest and most extensive period of time in American history when a fear of communism gripped the country, it was not the first. World War I was the first major foreign conflict the U.S. was involved in, afte...
April 16th. The year is 1963. Birmingham, Alabama has had a spring of non-violent protests known as the Birmingham Campaign, seeking to draw attention to the segregation against blacks by the city government and downtown retailers. The organizers lo...
No single figure in 20th century American history inspires such opposing opinions as J. Edgar Hoover, the iconic first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In his time, he was arguably the most powerful non-elected figure in the federal ...
America’s obsession with its own history has resulted in innumerable bestsellers. Like baseball and the Civil War, Prohibition is one of the grand American topics, and now it is the subject of Daniel Okrent’s masterful, prize-worthy tour...
In this "penetrating new analysis" (New York Times Book Review) Ira Katznelson fundamentally recasts our understanding of twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that all the key programs passed during the New Deal and Fair Deal era of t...
The Apollo space program is the most famous and celebrated in American history, but the first successful landing of men on the Moon during Apollo 11 had complicated roots dating back over a decade, and it also involved one of NASA’s most infa...
On paper, the extraordinarily unorthodox ideology spouted by Heaven's Gate ranks near the top of the list of most outlandish end-of-the-world prophecies, and it was built on a blend of Christian, Gnostic, supernatural, New Age, and extraterrestrial...
20th century Chicago was an ideal breeding ground for organized crime. A buzzing circuit board dotted with towering skyscrapers, brick buildings, worker's cottages, and an eclectic collection of greystone manors, the Windy City was further decked o...