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Freeman's Challenge
- The Murder That Shook America's Original Prison for Profit
- Narrated by: Shamaan Casey
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
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Publisher's summary
An award-winning historian tells a gripping, morally complicated story of murder, greed, race, and the true origins of prison for profit.
In the early nineteenth century, as slavery gradually ended in the North, a village in New York State invented a new form of unfreedom: the profit-driven prison. Uniting incarceration and capitalism, the village of Auburn built a prison that enclosed industrial factories. There, “slaves of the state” were leased to private companies. The prisoners earned no wages, yet they manufactured furniture, animal harnesses, carpets, and combs, which consumers bought throughout the North. Then one young man challenged the system.
In Freeman’s Challenge, Robin Bernstein tells the story of an Afro-Native teenager named William Freeman who was convicted of a horse theft he insisted he did not commit and sentenced to five years of hard labor in Auburn’s prison. Incensed at being forced to work without pay, Freeman demanded wages. His challenge triggered violence: first against him, then by him. Freeman committed a murder that terrified and bewildered white America. And white America struck back—with aftereffects that reverberate into our lives today in the persistent myth of inherent Black criminality. William Freeman’s unforgettable story reveals how the North invented prison for profit half a century before the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery “except as a punishment for crime”—and how Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and other African Americans invented strategies of resilience and resistance in a city dominated by a citadel of unfreedom.
Through one Black man, his family, and his city, Bernstein tells an explosive, moving story about the entangled origins of prison for profit and anti-Black racism.
Critic reviews
“Shamaan Casey brings a deep, captivating voice to his stellar performance of this recounting of one of America's first prisons for profit.… Casey is expressive—even his chapter headers have a character of their own—without being particularly emotional. His narration is so strong because of the diversity of his tones and emphases. Listeners won't be disappointed.”—AudioFile Magazine
“Freeman’s Challenge is a provocative, robust, and rigorously researched interrogation of the historical meaning of imprisonment. Bernstein’s compelling narrative provides insight not only into the institution of the prison in the United States but also into the lives of those whose newly experienced dreams of freedom were crushed by evolving intersections of punishment and racial capitalism. By disengaging the emergence of the prison from what has become its inevitable partner—‘rehabilitation’—Bernstein deftly reveals the deep connections between imprisonment, racism, and the development of the capitalist economy.”—Angela Davis, distinguished professor emerita, University of California, Santa Cruz
"Freeman’s Challenge changes the way we understand the development and lived reality of the American convict leasing system and the contours of racial inequality in the nineteenth century. Through captivating storytelling, Bernstein demonstrates that incarcerated people and their allies consistently challenged the prevailing logic of white supremacy and punishment to advocate for reform. Although Freeman’s remarkable story unfolded nearly two centuries ago, his struggle offers vital lessons for contemporary movements for social justice."—Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s
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- Length: 20 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Spanning the years of transition, 1944 to 1948, Ascent to Power illuminates Truman’s struggles to emerge as president in his own right. Yet, from a relatively unknown Missouri senator to the most powerful man on Earth, Truman’s legacy transcends. With his come-from-behind campaign in the fall of 1948, his courageous civil rights advocacy, and his role in liberating millions from militarist governments and brutal occupations, Truman’s decisions during these pivotal years changed the course of the world in ways so significant we live with them today.
By: David L. Roll
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Rebellion
- How Antiliberalism Is Tearing America Apart—Again
- By: Robert Kagan
- Narrated by: Jason Culp
- Length: 5 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The 2024 election could be the last free election held in a unified America. So warns Robert Kagan in this brilliant and terrifying analysis of the perilous state of democracy in the United States today. If Donald Trump loses the upcoming election, as he did in 2020, but refuses to accept the result, as he also did in the last election, he is likely to call on his millions of followers to repudiate the election results. It will be a short step from there to Republican-dominated states rejecting the legitimacy of the federal government and effectively seceding.
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Best Book In Its Class
- By Laurie on 05-02-24
By: Robert Kagan
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Minority Rule
- The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People - and the Fight to Resist It
- By: Ari Berman
- Narrated by: Gary Tiedemann
- Length: 11 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift.
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SO much great information!
- By CharlieSeymourJr on 05-01-24
By: Ari Berman
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Takeover
- Hitler's Final Rise to Power
- By: Timothy W. Ryback
- Narrated by: Richard Attlee
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1932, the Weimar Republic was on the verge of collapse. One in three Germans was unemployed. Violence was rampant. Hitler’s National Socialists surged at the polls. Paul von Hindenburg, an aging war hero and avowed monarchist, was a reluctant president bound by oath to uphold the constitution. The November elections offered Hitler the prospect of a Reichstag majority and the path to political power. But instead, the Nazis lost two million votes.
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how even those from whom so little could be expected can mold history
- By Doug Easterling on 04-19-24
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The Demon of Unrest
- A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War
- By: Erik Larson
- Narrated by: Will Patton, Erik Larson
- Length: 17 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln became the fluky victor in a tight race for president. The country was bitterly at odds; Southern extremists were moving ever closer to destroying the Union, with one state after another seceding and Lincoln powerless to stop them. Slavery fueled the conflict, but somehow the passions of North and South came to focus on a lonely federal fortress in Charleston Harbor: Fort Sumter.
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A Most Appropriate Narrator
- By D.P. on 05-01-24
By: Erik Larson