James Oakes has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 234 ratings. The most-rated is Back Blast.
Back Blast
Summary
From the number-one New York Times best-selling coauthor of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan novels comes an all-new explosive thriller featuring the lethal assassin known as the Gray Man.... Court Gentry was the CIA's best agent. Until the day the agency turned against him and put out a kill-on-sight order. That's when the enigmatic international assassin called the Gray Man was born - and Court has been working for himself ever since. Now Court is back in Washington, looking for answers. He's determined to find out what happened all those years ago that made the agency turn against him. On his list to interrogate are his former partners and the men who sent him on his last mission. What he doesn't realize is that the questions that arose from that mission are still reverberating in the US intelligence community, and he's stumbled onto a secret that powerful people want kept under wraps. And now they have Court in their crosshairs. Court Gentry is used to having people on his trail, but this time it's on US soil - the last place he wants to be. Now he'll have to find the answers to his fate while evading capture...and avoiding death.
©2016 Mark Strode Greaney (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
Freedom National
Summary
The consensus view of the Civil War - that it was first and foremost a war to restore the Union, and an antislavery war only later when it became necessary for Union victory - dies here. James Oakes’s groundbreaking history shows how deftly Lincoln and congressional Republicans pursued antislavery throughout the war, pragmatic in policy but steadfast on principle. In the disloyal South the federal government quickly began freeing slaves, immediately and without slaveholder compensation, as they fled to Union lines. In the loyal Border States the Republicans tried coaxing officials into abolishing slavery gradually with promises of compensation. As the devastating war continued with slavery still entrenched, Republicans embraced a more aggressive military emancipation, triggered by the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally it took a constitutional amendment on abolition to achieve the Union’s primary goal in the war. Here, in a magisterial history, are the intertwined stories of emancipation and the Civil War.
©2012 James Oakes (P)2012 Gildan Media LLC
The Scorpion's Sting
Summary
An award-winning historian illuminates the strategy for ending slavery that precipitated the crisis of civil war. Surrounded by a ring of fire, the scorpion stings itself to death. The image, widespread among antislavery leaders before the Civil War, captures their long-standing strategy for peaceful abolition: They would surround the slave states with a cordon of freedom. They planned to use federal power wherever they could to establish freedom: the western territories, the District of Columbia, the high seas. By constricting slavery they would induce a crisis: Slaves would escape in ever-greater numbers, the southern economy would falter, and finally the southern states would abolish the institution themselves. For their part the southern states fully understood this antislavery strategy. They cited it repeatedly as they adopted secession ordinances in response to Lincoln's election. The scorpion's sting is the centerpiece of this fresh, incisive exploration of slavery and the Civil War: Was there a peaceful route to abolition? Was Lincoln late to emancipation? What role did race play in the politics of slavery? With stunning insight James Oakes moves us ever closer to a new understanding of the most momentous events in our history.
©2014 James Oakes (P)2014 Audible Inc.
The Crooked Path to Abolition
Summary
An award-winning scholar uncovers the guiding principles of Lincoln's antislavery strategies. Lincoln adopted the antislavery view that the Constitution made freedom the rule in the United States, slavery the exception. Where federal power prevailed, so did freedom. Where state power prevailed, that state determined the status of slavery, and the federal government could not interfere. It would take state action to achieve the final abolition of American slavery. With this understanding, Lincoln and his antislavery allies used every tool available to undermine the institution. Wherever the Constitution empowered direct federal action, they intervened. As a congressman in 1849 Lincoln sponsored a bill to abolish slavery in Washington, DC. He reentered politics in 1854 to oppose what he considered the unconstitutional opening of the territories to slavery by the Kansas-Nebraska Act. President Lincoln took full advantage of the antislavery options opened by the Civil War. The Emancipation Proclamation, a military order of the president, undermined slavery across the South. It led to abolition by six slave states, which then joined the coalition to affect what Lincoln called the "King's cure": state ratification of the constitutional amendment that in 1865 finally abolished slavery.
©2021 James Oakes (P)2021 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books