African Wars

Late on the evening of October 16, 1859, John Brown and his band of 18 raiders descended on Harpers Ferry at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. In an ill-fated attempt to incite a slave insurrection, they seized the federal arsenal, took hostages, and retreated to a fire engine house. The raiders were routed, and several were captured. Soon after, they were tried, convicted, and hanged. Among Brown's raiders were five African Americans whose lives and deaths have long been overshadowed by their martyred leader and, even today, are little remembered.

Devotion tells the inspirational story of the U.S. Navy’s most famous aviation duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown, and the Marines they fought to defend. A white New Englander from the country-club scene, Tom passed up Harvard to fly fighters for his country. An African American sharecropper’s son from Mississippi, Jesse became the navy’s first Black carrier pilot, defending a nation that wouldn’t even serve him in a bar.

A Texas Legacy Family Saga - Book 3 Just before the Civil War, in the dark corners of the New Orleans waterfront, Billy Jefferson's dreams are yanked from him before he'd barely walked off the ship from Scotland. In the summer of 1860, America is a tinder box, ready to blow. Issues of states' rights, slavery and regionalism have come to a boiling point. Citizens across the South are willing to fight and die to maintain their Southern way of life. The South is a tough place to be if you disagree with that philosophy. It's especially tough if you are a free person of color or their friends. ...

Widely praised and winner of the 2023 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize, this book illuminates why Lincoln’s unprecedented welcoming of African American men and women to the White House transformed the trajectory of race relations in the United States. From his 1862 meetings with Black Christian ministers, Lincoln began inviting African Americans of every background into his home, from ex-slaves from the Deep South to champions of abolitionism such as Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth.

Dealing with the Italians was one thing, but the British faced an entirely different monster in North Africa when Erwin Rommel, a German general who had gained much fame for his role in the invasions of Poland and France, was sent to North Africa in February 1941. For the next two years, the Allies would face off against the legendary Desert Fox and his Afrika Korps. This audiobook chronicles one of World War II’s most famous fighting units.

Set in Nigeria in the late 1960s, The Road to the Country is the epic story of a shy, bookish student haunted by long-held guilt who must go to war to free himself. When his younger brother disappears as the country explodes in civil war, Kunle must set out on an impossible rescue mission. Kunle’s search for his brother becomes a journey of atonement that will see him conscripted into the breakaway Biafran army and forced to fight a war he hardly understands, all while navigating the prophecies of a local Seer, he who marks Kunle as an abami eda—one who will die and return to life.

The first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, An Army at Dawn is history of the highest order - brilliantly researched, rich with new material and surprising insights, the deeply human story of a monumental battle for the future of civilization. "An absolute masterpiece," says Andrew Carroll, author of War Letters, "This book is storytelling - and history - at its most riveting."

Business. Violence. Concerns about profits. Questions of conscience. This is the untold story of the dealings between a US tire giant and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, the man who would become the first head of state convicted of crimes against humanity since the Nazi era.

When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, America faced a crisis. The new nation was deeply in debt and needed its economy to grow quickly, but its merchant ships were under attack. Pirates from North Africa's Barbary coast routinely captured American sailors and held them as slaves, demanding ransom and tribute payments far beyond what the new country could afford.

Thanks in large part to the support of a powerful U.S. Senator with ties to a shadowy group of politicians and bureaucrats, David Morgan’s career survived the debacle that was Dagastan, and three years later he is posted to the West African country of Naganda as the American ambassador. As bad as Dagastan had been, Morgan finds that it was a cake walk compared to the quagmire that is Naganda. Having recently undergone a military coup, and with its economy in shambles, Naganda is now in the throes of a vicious internal power struggle, with China and the Soviet Union manipulating the ...

Powerful, epic, and compelling, Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen shines light on a nearly forgotten figure in history. Cathy Williams was born and lived a slave - until the Union army comes and destroys the only world she’s known. Separated from her family, she makes the impossible decision - to fight in the army disguised as a man with the Buffalo Soldiers. With courage and wit, Cathy must not only fight for her survival and freedom in the ultimate man’s world, but never give up on her mission to find her family, and the man she loves.

In I Saw Death Coming, Kidada E. Williams offers a breakthrough account of the much-debated Reconstruction period, transporting listeners into the daily existence of formerly enslaved people building hope-filled new lives.

“I don’t know if it was the shouts, the gunfire, the dogs barking or a combination of all three which woke me, but the shock was such that I almost fell out of bed in my haste to rejoin the conscious. I was naked, save for the pair of shorts I always wore in bed, and had no time to dress. I didn’t bother with the light. As I awkwardly pushed my feet into the pair of flip-flops, I grabbed for the pistol belt. I heard my father shout something while I was fumbling to fasten the belt around my waist. My bedroom door suddenly opened. My god! The terrs are in the house?! I was reaching, ...

The crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s is arguably the least examined crisis in American history. Beginning with the myths inspired by Reagan’s war on drugs, journalist Donovan X. Ramsey’s exacting analysis traces the path from the last triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement to the devastating realities we live with today: a racist criminal justice system, continued mass incarceration and gentrification, and increased police brutality.

Author Remi Adeleke takes listeners back to stories from his childhood as Nigerian royalty to losing his father early in life and being financially stripped of everything by the Nigerian government. He delves into being raised by a single mother in the Bronx and doesn’t shy away from the illegal activities that threatened to derail his future. Having gone through times of intense struggle, pressure, and failure, Adeleke shares his inspiring story of overcoming the odds, even when it didn’t make sense; and ultimately experiencing true personal transformation.

New York Times best-selling author Kristen Green draws on years of research to tell the extraordinary and little-known story of young Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who blazed a path of liberation for thousands. She was forced to have the children of a brutal slave trader and live on the premises of his slave jail, known as the “Devil’s Half Acre”. When she inherited the jail after the death of her slaveholder, she transformed it into “God’s Half Acre”, a school where Black men could fulfill their dreams.

It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young Black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.

It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.”

In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Dorothy Thom, Spelman graduate, librarian and Francophile, joins the Women’s Army Corps wanting to do her part for the war effort. Longing for adventure, she has one question for the recruiter: “Do you think I’ll get to go abroad?” As Dorothy and her sister WACs discover, life in the Army is an adventure filled with unexpected deprivations and culture shock. Women from all levels of society, secretaries, teachers, and sharecroppers, work together to navigate a military segregated by race and gender.

Something About Ann, a historical fiction novella, is accompanied by twelve interconnected short stories that follow a group of soldiers who faced traumatic experiences in Vietnam, as depicted in the novel A Long Way Back. Although they managed to remain close after returning to the States, violence and turmoil continue to haunt the soldiers as they try to normalize their lives, sometimes depending on the help of each other or relying on the skills they acquired in combat. In the novella Something About Ann, a black Vietnam veteran and a Vietnamese woman fall in love in Cleveland, Ohio, not...