American History Tellers

And Audible's incredible selection of wellness titles can help, like the Penguin Classics version of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, maybe the original self-help book.

New from world-renowned historian Yvall Noah Harari, author of the number one international bestseller sapiens comes the second volume in his middle grade series unstoppable us available now wherever books are sold.

Oh, the I am become death, quote, is straight out of the Hindu scripture, the *Bhagavad Gita*.

It became the top-grossing movie of all time until 1939, when Gone With the Wind was released.

I know about Common Sense. I know that this war is a conflict much bigger than our farm, our state. The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.

The pamphlet that stirred Martin's grandfather, Common Sense, would become the first American bestseller.

Next, Ralston read out the Tennessee anti-evolution statute in the entire first chapter of Genesis.

And what Du Bois writes in this really centering Black freed people as part of this reconstruction study actually forms the foundation of Eric Foner's Reconstruction, which is what people consider the seminal book about Reconstruction now.

And Foner gives all credit to Du Bois.

in the preface to the group's 1939 book Alcoholics Anonymous the story of how many thousands of men and women have recovered from alcoholism Dr. William Silkworth calls alcoholism an illness which only a spiritual experience will conquer

On the next episode, John Steinbeck immerses himself in the lives of migrant workers in California, elevating their stories in books like The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.

Over the course of 1874 and 1875, Twain wrote his first solo novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Drawing from Twain's own childhood, Tom Sawyer followed the antics of a mischievous boy loosely based on Twain himself, growing up near the Mississippi River.

Tom's friend Huckleberry Finn was based on a childhood friend of Twain's, and Twain called the novel A Hymn to Boyhood.

Here is a storyteller justifying the novel as a form that transcends time and place.

The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.

In our courts, when it's a white man's word against a black man's, the white man always wins.

The Pulitzer is one thing the approval of my own people is the only literary reward I covet.

What happens in a small southern town when citizens learn that one of its natives has just become a Pulitzer Prize winner? Well, the word travels fast telephones ring bulletins go on the radio people jump in their automobiles and travel to the next block to tell their neighbors.

This new one, Spy of the Rebellion, tells the story of Pinkerton's time as a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published her landmark book, Silent Spring.

If you'd like to learn more about Eleanor Roosevelt, we recommend Eleanor by David Michaelis, the three-part biography by Blanche Wisencook, and the autobiography of Eleanor Roosevelt.

In her book, The Residents, Inside the Private World of the White House, Brower shares stories from the staff who keep the White House running 24 hours a day.

There are about 100 people who work behind the scenes at the White House.

And they're there from one administration to the next. So they are not hired by the president, which I think is really unique here in Washington to have a nonpartisan group of people who are working for American democracy and the White House and what it stands for and not one president or another.

And they get so close to the president and first lady that I know from keeping in touch with several of these butlers, you know, when it's their birthdays, they receive a phone call occasionally. And one of the really wonderful things is that when someone gets married or someone passes away, sometimes the presidents and first ladies go to the funerals or the weddings, which is really special.

For me, the most fascinating story is of Mary Prince, who was the Carters' nanny.

He'd published a best-selling book Up From Slavery, and he ran the Tuskegee Institute down in Alabama.

Kate's most recent book is the first authorized biography of Elizabeth Taylor.

Later Hammett would fictionalize this incident in his best-known book, The Maltese Falcon, in which private detective Sam Spade solves a case of a stolen figurine on board the passenger ship La Paloma.

In his first novel, Red Harvest, The Continental Op worked for a supervisor referred to as just the old man, someone who had no more warmth in him than a hangman's rope. It was James McParland, who died in 1919, that was the inspiration for the old man.

In Hammett's words, the fictional McParlant could spit icicles in July and was known among agents as Pontius Pilate for sending his men out to be crucified on suicide missions.

If you'd like to learn more about the Pinkertons, we recommend The Lost Detective by Nathan Ward and The Eye That Never Sleeps by Frank Moore.