Free audiobook

The Last Best Hope

A history of the United States from the first people to reach the Americas to the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of independence: Cahokia and the Haudenosaunee, Jamestown and Plymouth, the Revolution and the Constitution, slavery and the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, two world wars and the Depression, civil rights and the Cold War, and the country today. Every quotation comes from a public-domain source, and every era's sources are named.

40chapters
8.0hours
15,000years of history

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Chapter 1

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Chapters

    Sources by era

    Quotations come from public-domain translations: Caesar (McDevitte and Bohn, 1869), Gregory of Tours (Brehaut, 1916), Einhard (Turner, 1880), the Song of Roland (Scott Moncrieff, 1919), Joinville (Wedgwood, 1906), Froissart (Berners), the trial of Joan of Arc (Murray, 1902), Commynes (Scoble, 1855), Montaigne (Cotton), Saint-Simon (Bayle St. John, 1857), Rousseau (Cole, 1913) and Hugo (Hapgood, 1887). Every page the research opened is listed under its era.

    Chapters 1 to 5: First peoples and the colonies
    Chapters 6 to 10: Revolution and founding
    Chapters 11 to 15: The early republic
    Chapters 16 to 20: Sectional crisis, Civil War and Reconstruction
    Chapters 21 to 25: The Gilded Age and the Progressive Era
    Chapters 26 to 30: The world wars and the Depression
    Chapters 31 to 35: The Cold War and civil rights
    Chapters 36 to 40: Since the Cold War

    Narrated by an AI voice. Written and fact-checked with the help of AI tools, from published scholarship, museum records and the ancient texts themselves; where scholars disagree, the book says so. Dates before the colonies are approximate. Events of 2025 and 2026 are told from official records and news reports available when the book was finished, in November 2026.

    Want to see it? The American history timeline has the people and events in this book, with sources.