Basic History of the United States: The Beginning of the Republic, 1775-1825 [Unabridged] [Audio Cassette]

Clarence B. Carson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1993

This second volume covers the Declaration of Independence through the fruits of independence. Carson combines scholarly exactness with evocative passages for a clearer understanding of the people and events, the triumphs and shortcomings, that shaped this nation.

Editorial Reviews

From AudioFile

The five-volume Basic History has gained a well-deserved reputation for combining insight with simple narrative style. Mary Woods, though, is not the ideal narrator. She's almost too friendly as she carefully reads this excellent text of basic American history; the shining feature here is the text itself rather than the production. A crisp matter-of-fact style would be better suited to the material. Still, this is a good text on basic history in the audiobook format and the narration is bearable. The presentation rates a solid "adequate." D.W. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an alternate Audio Cassette edition.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks; Unabridged edition (January 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786104155
• ISBN-13: 978-0786104154
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.7 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,638,201 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best modern history of the U.S. in my opinion, February 10, 2001

By 

Jean-Francois Virey (59500 DOUAI France) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 1: The Colonial Experience, 1607-1774 (Audio Cassette)

By the late 1970s, conservative historian Clarence B. Carson was known as the author of several volumes on American intellectual, political and economic history, including *The Fateful Turn*, which chronicled America's abandonment of individualism in favour of collectivism in the years 1880-1960 and *The War on the Poor*, an examination of the disastrous effects of government programs to "help the poor".

But Carson felt that a much longer work was needed to fulfil his intellectual mission: a complete history of the United States that would correct the errors and distorsions of those available on the market. For Carson was very dissatisfied with the existing histories of the U.S.. As he wrote in The Review of the News in December 1982: "For years I have cursed the darkness, so to speak, as I have examined and reviewed history book after history book. On rare occasions, I would examine one with rising expectations as I made my way through the early part of the text... But, from the Civil War onward, even the best of them tend to go downhill into the miasma of leaden accounts of industrialization, mass production, the class struggle, the magnification of the alleged injustices of the American system, until by the time they reach the New Deal, they read as if they were written by press agents of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, some have been".

What he wanted was to avoid the biases of "Marxists, socialists, anti-Americans, skeptics, humanists, and many, many others with axes to grind", by committing himself to telling "as faithful an account as I could make it of what had actually taken place."

This effort was to have been published by a private foundation, Western Goals, whose purpose was "to build and strengthen the political, economic and social structure of the United States and Western Civilization so as to make any merger with totalitarians impossible". But Carson's supporter in the foundation, U.S. Congressman Larry Mc Donald, was killed before the first volume had even been published: in an ironic twist of history, he died on board the Korean airliner that was shot down by the Soviets in 1983, along with 268 other innocent civilians.

Undaunted, Carson the academic turned into a businessman, creating the American Textbook Committee, and went on to publish the rest of his work independently, relying mostly on word of mouth and the eventual promotion of his writings by conservative or libertarian bookclubs.

The resulting history of the United States is definitely my favorite. While most modern historians assume that what the Founders created was a "democracy" which protected "civil rights", and that their efforts were finally crowned by the establishment of the welfare state in the last century, Carson does understand that the United States are a constitutional federated republic based on the classical doctrine of individual rights.

For this reason, among many others, as Carson hoped it would, *Basic American History* succeeds in "arousing anew that sense of mission and purpose which brought these United States into being".

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I would even read it for recreational reading, March 30, 2003

By 

C. Mann "clifebooks" (Lynchburg, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Basic History of the United States: The Beginning of the Republic, 1775-1825 (Audio Cassette)

I had to read a lot of Carson's books for school. I enjoyed reading this history in particular. Everything is clearly spelled out, understandable, and makes perfect sense. Carson's tells the history that you won't find in most history books, which is very welcome.

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Clarence Carson and A Basic History of the United States,, May 9, 2011

By 

sjb - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Basic History of the United States, Vol. 1 (Audible Audio Edition)

As with all the volumes of Carson's history of the nation, this volume is usually based on some facts with a heavy dose of his own interpretations. Carson views history, as he does economics, from an ultra-conservative frame of reference. That does not make his interpretations de facto wrong, although this writer considers his views reactionary. My point is to alert readers that there is no attempt a balance; the book is a polemic as it written.