Results by "Jordan Blake Carter" in All categories

Massachusetts has a long list of accomplishments and absolutely no intention of letting anyone forget them. Over the last four centuries, the Commonwealth has helped launch revolutions, shape public education, challenge slavery, build world-class universities, pioneer scientific breakthroughs...

West Virginia is what happens when a group of mountain counties looks at the rest of their state and says, "Absolutely not."Created during the Civil War through one of the strangest political maneuvers in American history, West Virginia became a land of coal booms, labor wars, moonshine legends...

Mexico has survived empires, invasions, dictators, revolutions, economic disasters, foreign occupations, political corruption, volcanic geography, and the occasional decision to build a city on top of a lake and simply hope for the best. Somehow, against all reasonable expectations, it keeps...

Everyone thinks they know New Jersey. It's the Turnpike. The Shore. The traffic. The smell. But beneath the jokes lies one of the most important, influential, and downright bizarre states in American history. New Jersey gave America its first dinosaur skeleton, hosted more Revolutionary War battles than any other state, launched the age of modern industry, survived foreign sabotage, witnessed the Hindenburg disaster, inspired The Sopranos, and somehow became the birthplace of both suburbia and several environmental disasters.

Complex PTSD can change the way you see yourself, your relationships, and the world around you. But healing is possible, and understanding what you're experiencing is an important first step. Living with Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) can feel exhausting and confusing. Hypervigilance, emotional flashbacks, shame, dissociation, and difficulty trusting others are not signs of weakness or personal failure. They are common responses to prolonged trauma and chronic stress.

Indiana was never supposed to be interesting. It was supposed to be orderly. In Hoosier Discipline: An Irreverent History of Indiana, Jordan Blake Carter dismantles the familiar image of Indiana as a bland flyover state and replaces it with something stranger, sharper, and far more revealing. Beneath the cornfields, courthouse squares, basketball gyms, and perfectly straight roads lies a state obsessed with systems: systems of land, government, morality, labor, race, education, and control. This is not a nostalgic celebration of covered bridges and small-town charm.

What do starving colonists, powdered-wig aristocrats, Confederate generals, moonshiners, civil rights activists, and data-center billionaires have in common? Virginia. In this fast-paced and often hilarious history, Jordan Blake Carter explores the people, events, and contradictions that shaped the Commonwealth and, by extension, the United States itself. From Jamestown's near collapse to the rise of modern Northern Virginia, Crowns, Cavaliers, and Confederates examines how one state repeatedly found itself at the center of America's biggest triumphs and greatest failures.

Nebraska has spent most of American history being underestimated. Flat, boring, forgettable. Flyover country. Which is impressive, considering Nebraska helped feed the nation, fuel westward expansion, shape the Populist movement, host the command center for America’s nuclear arsenal, and quietly become one of the most important agricultural regions on Earth.

Canada's official national strategy has long been simple: Make a mistake. Say sorry. Change the subject. In So Sorry, Jordan Blake Carter takes listeners on an unforgettable journey through the history Canada would often rather not discuss. You'll encounter vanished peoples, ambitious explorers, fur-trade empires, rebellions, political scandals, broken promises, constitutional showdowns, and generations of Canadians trying to figure out who they are.

Welcome to Vermont, a place where mountains stand firm, syrup flows freely, and rebellion comes naturally. This irreverent history traces the state’s journey from its earliest Abenaki communities through colonial disputes, independence, industrial innovation, cultural renewal, and the rise of fierce modern progressivism. Along the way you will explore maple forests, winter storms, legendary lake creatures, craft breweries, small town politics, and the steady belief that community matters more than convenience.

Flat. Empty. Forgettable. Wrong. South Dakota is a place of ancient stone, broken treaties, gold rush chaos, and histories that still echo today. What looks quiet from the highway turns out to be anything but. Flat Out: An Irreverent History of South Dakota digs into the real story with humor and honesty, revealing a state that is far more complicated, and far more interesting, than it gets credit for.

Texas is not just a state. It’s a performance. It’s a myth dressed in boots, dripping in barbecue sauce, swaggering through hurricanes, and bragging about high school football as if the future of civilization depended on it. In Texas Forever, For Better or Worse, Jordan Blake Carter delivers a witty, unsanitized tour of the Lone Star State’s past and present: the legends, the contradictions, and the absurdities that make Texas impossible to ignore.

Flat, Fast, and Frequently Important: An Irreverent History of Ohio is the story of the state that somehow keeps ending up in the middle of everything while maintaining the energy of a place people mostly drive through on the way somewhere else. In this sharp, funny, and deeply researched history, Jordan Blake Carter traces Ohio’s transformation from glacial wilderness and ancient Indigenous crossroads to industrial powerhouse, political kingmaker, and recurring main character in the American story.

Maryland is tiny. Maryland is consequential. Maryland has never once confused these two facts as being in tension. From the Chesapeake Bay's Indigenous trading world to tobacco plantations to Civil War battlefields to crab-seasoned identity politics, Crabs, Catholics, and Constant Drama is the history of a state that has spent four centuries being more important than people remember and more contradictory than it will admit. It was founded as a Catholic refuge and immediately started running on coercion.

South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum. It fired the first shots of the Civil War. It invented nullification. It blockaded its own harbor with pirates. It sent Strom Thurmond to the Senate for 48 years. It built one of the great cities of the colonial world on the labor of enslaved people, nearly got destroyed by the people it was enslaving, survived Sherman's march with its attitude intact, and produced, in the same 350 years, some of the most consequential villains and most remarkable heroes in American history, often from the same county.

Missouri has always had a talent for being exactly in the wrong place at the right time. Too north to be South, too south to be North, and too stubborn to pick a side about anything else, it has spent centuries collecting misunderstandings like souvenirs. Misery, Missouri, and Other Misunderstandings is a fast, irreverent romp through the state’s strangest moments, from frontier chaos and river town hustle to political showdowns that somehow made everything more complicated than it needed to be.

American democracy has always survived on a strange blend of hope, spectacle, and pure human unpredictability. This book follows fourteen politicians who pushed the limits of behavior, ambition, and reality itself. Some were brilliant. Some were reckless. Some were dangerous. All of them changed the American story in ways the textbooks still avoid. With humor, grit, and a clear eye for political absurdity, this irreverent history dives into the characters who made the United States impossible to ignore.

The paradise was always a sales pitch. Hawaii is one of the most visited places on Earth and one of the least honestly described. Most Americans know it through airline commercials, hotel lobbies, and textbooks that spend two paragraphs on the overthrow of a sovereign nation before moving on to something more comfortable. This book is not interested in comfortable.

Kentucky has been explained to death. It has been flattened into a punchline, romanticized into a symbol, and studied into abstraction. None of it has worked, because none of it has taken the place seriously on its own terms. This book does.

Delaware: the First State, the Forgotten State, and the strangest little powerhouse you never paid attention to. This is not your high school history textbook. From Lenape fishing villages to Dutch and Swedish turf wars, from Caesar Rodney’s wheezing midnight ride to the explosive rise of DuPont, Delaware has been shaping America while pretending to be invisible. Along the way it perfected the art of being indispensable without being noticed: chickens, chemicals, corporations, and boardwalks all rolled into one.