Showing results by author "Carter Blake" in All Categories

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.

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.

Before Columbus Got Lost rewrites the opening chapter of the Americas with humor, heart, and honesty. Jordan Blake Carter invites listeners to step into a continent that was never empty and never primitive. From the astronomers of Chaco Canyon to the philosophers of the Haudenosaunee, from the engineers who carved irrigation canals through desert sand to the artists who painted prayers onto clay, this is a history that refuses to whisper.

America tells itself it was born in freedom and perfected through progress. The truth is harder to look at. For more than two hundred years, the government has used its own armies and laws to control the very people it claims to protect, from the soldiers who crushed the Whiskey Rebellion to the police who fired on students at Kent State. Friendly Fire is a fearless and often darkly funny exploration of how power in America defends itself.

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.

Welcome to Florida, the only state that could turn a swamp into a spectacle and a scandal into a tourist attraction. From conquistadors chasing myths to retirees chasing golf balls, Sunburns, Scandals, and Swamp Things tells the story of America’s strangest state with humor, heart, and just enough truth to sting. Historian and essayist Jordan Blake Carter takes listeners on a wild ride through five centuries of chaos and charisma, uncovering the patterns that make Florida both paradise and punchline.

Too high, too proud, too wild, too sure it has life figured out. From gold-rush fever and silver-boom scandals to ski-town glamour and wildfire panic, High, Holy, and Half-Crazy: An Irreverent History of Colorado takes you on a fast, funny, and unfiltered tour through the Centennial State’s most spectacular contradictions.

Irreverent Maine: Lobsters, Lumber, and Legendary Weirdness is a history that refuses to be polite. From the Wabanaki and the first bumbling European settlers to lobster feasts and lobster wars, from Civil War heroes and shipwrecked sailors to eccentric governors and ghost stories, this book tells Maine’s story with humor, grit, and a healthy dose of sarcasm.

It's been almost a year since I've seen her, the only woman that's ever gotten under my skin, and made me wish I was a better man. More than just the washed up hockey player, turned sports journalist whose body is almost as scarred as his soul. Now, she's pregnant with my brother's baby. A baby he wants nothing to do with. And he's asked me to clean up his mess. I have no intention of offering her the deal he's laid out. I have a deal of my own. One that will finally make her mine.

Georgia has always been the South’s wild card. It built empires from cotton, birthed legends of justice, produced presidents, shaped hip hop, hosted the world, and flipped national elections when no one was looking. But beneath the peaches and pageantry lies a history of resistance, reinvention, and relentless contradiction.

New Hampshire’s industrial revolution didn’t unfold in quiet workshops. It exploded along the rivers in a storm of spinning frames, flooded mills, and enough cotton lint to make the mountains sneeze.

Arkansas has always been the state people forget about — until it suddenly crashes onto the front page with diamonds in cow pastures, dueling governors, civil rights battles, or a president from a town called Hope. Mocked as a land of barefoot hillbillies and moonshine stills, praised for its wild rivers and stubborn resilience, Arkansas has never fit neatly into anyone’s box. Irreverent History of Arkansas: Diamonds, Deliverance, and Razorbacks takes listeners on a wry, sharp-eyed tour through the state’s messy past.

First in flight. Fierce in basketball. Divided by barbecue. And stubborn about everything. North Carolina has never been easy to pin down. It dragged its feet on secession yet sent more soldiers to die for the Confederacy than any other state. It boasts of being “first in freedom” while clinging to old hierarchies. It gave the world pirates, bootleggers, moonshine-fueled stock car races, and barbecue feuds so fierce they could outlast most wars. In this sharp and funny history, Jordan Blake Carter takes you on an irreverent ride through four centuries of contradictions.

Gumbo and Grit: A Not-So-Polite History of Louisiana dives into the state’s layered past with equal parts candor and wit. You’ll meet conquistadors and Cajuns, pirates and populists, enslaved laborers and jazz legends, all stirring the pot that made Louisiana what it is today.

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.

In Gold, Guns, and Grizzlies, Jordan Blake Carter takes you through the hilarious, gritty, and often absurd history of the Treasure State. You’ll meet vigilantes who hanged more neighbors than outlaws, homesteaders who discovered optimism is not a substitute for rainfall, and tourists who thought bison were selfie-friendly.

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.

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.