Author: Charles River Editors
Narrator: KC Wayman
Unabridged: 1 hr 43 min
Format: Digital Audiobook
Publisher: Findaway Voices
Published: 05/07/2022
Today every American is taught about watershed moments in the history of minorities’ struggles for civil rights over the course of American history: the Civil War, Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Indeed, the use of the phrase “Civil Rights Movement” in America today almost invariably refers to the period of time from 1954-1964.
However, the Civil Rights Movement actually came into existence long before it is presumed to have done so. The movement's primary work was slow, evolving, gradual and long-term. Its more glamorous moments, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956), the Selma to Montgomery March (1965), and the March on Washington (1963), mainly were supplemental to the all-important grassroots work already going on in communities, churches, legislatures, and courts. The nascent stages of the movement actually began far earlier, among abolitionists and the writings and activism of Frederick Douglass and others.
Beginning in the summer of 1962, King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) began to express interest in targeting one of the South's most brutally segregated cities. Nicknamed “Bombingham,” the city had witnessed the bombing of over a dozen black homes and churches in the previous five years. A victory in Birmingham was a goal that would embolden the Civil Rights Movement like never before.
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...