Jordan Blake Carter

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...

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.

History books like to start with ships, flags, and a man who got lost and called it discovery. But the real story of America begins long before that, in a world alive with cities, councils, trade routes, art, and ceremony.

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.

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.

America tells itself it was born in freedom and perfected through progress. The truth is harder to look at.

One Truth, Many Paths: How the World’s Religions Share More Than We Think What if the world’s religions, despite their differences, are telling parts of the same human story? From ancient myths to modern rituals, Jordan Blake Carter uncovers the shared values, moral codes, and deep questions...

What can a cactus teach you about boundaries, survival, and thriving in a world that wants too much of you? More than you think.

Oregon isn’t tidy. It’s moody, messy, and gloriously contradictory. This is the state that bans Styrofoam but worships chainsaws, that rails against Californians while happily selling them real estate, and that brags about recycling while secretly hoarding sticky six-packs in the garage.

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...

Nebraska has spent most of American history being underestimated. Flat, boring, forgettable. Flyover country.

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.

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.

What do starving colonists, powdered-wig aristocrats, Confederate generals, moonshiners, civil rights activists, and data-center billionaires have in common? Virginia.

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...

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...

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.

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.

Maryland is tiny. Maryland is consequential. Maryland has never once confused these two facts as being in tension.