The American Experiment: Dialogues on a Dream Audiobook

About the Authors

Madeleine Albright (1937-2022) served as America’s sixty-fourth secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, the first woman to hold that position. Her distinguished career also includes positions on Capitol Hill, on the National Security Council, and as US ambassador to the United Nations. She also wrote several New York Times bestselling books.

Jon Meacham is a Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer and the author of several New York Times bestsellers, including three that have made their #1 bestsellers list. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Book Review and a contributing editor of Time magazine, and he holds the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University

Ken Burns is an American director and producer of documentary films, known for his style of using archival footage and photographs. His documentaries have been nominated for two Academy Awards, and have won Emmy Awards, among other honors.

David M. Rubenstein is the New York Times bestselling author, host of The David Rubenstein Show on Bloomberg TV and PBS, an original signer of The Giving Pledge, and a recipient of the Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy and the MoMA’s David Rockefeller Award. He is chairman of the boards of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the Council on Foreign Relations. He is cofounder and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, one of the world’s largest and most successful private equity firms.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and the holder of the distinguished Alphonse Fletcher Jr. University Professorship at Harvard. The author of several award-winning works of literary criticism, he also wrote the memoir Colored People; The Future of the Race, coauthored with Cornel West; and Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man.

Sonja Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1976, and from Yale Law School in 1979. She worked as assistant district attorney in New York and then at the law firm of Pavia & Harcourt. From 1992 to 2009, she served as a judge on the US District Court, Southern District of New York, and from 1998, on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. In May 2009, President Barack Obama nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court; she assumed this role on August 8, 2009.

Drew Gilpin Faust is the author of several books, including the New York Times bestselling This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, and Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War, which won the Francis Parkman Prize. A former dean and university president, she is the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University.

Douglas Brinkley is an acclaimed historian and award-winning author of many books, including six New York Times bestsellers. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” His book The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and his two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link–Warren F. Kuehl Prize. Other awards he has won include the Frances K. Hutchison Medal, Robin W. Winks Award for Enhancing Public Understanding of National Parks, and the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s Lifetime Heritage Award. He is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies.

Walter Isaacson is the author of highly acclaimed works of nonfiction, including several biographies that have made the #1 spot on the New York Times bestsellers list. A professor of history at Tulane University, he has been CEO of the Aspen Institute, chair of CNN, and editor of Time. Visit him at Isaacson.Tulane.edu.

Colleen Delany has been a sparkling jewel in the crown of Washington’s vastly talented acting community for thirty-seven days now and will confidently challenge to a fierce best out of three in “paper-rock-scissors” anyone wishing to topple her from that lofty perch. Primarily a stage actress,—having played roles at Shakespeare Theatre Company, Goodman Theatre, Arena Stage, Signature Theatre, Folger Shakespeare Library, Studio Theatre, Olney Theatre, Woolly Mammoth, Theater J, Washington Stage Guild, Theater of the First Amendment, and Source Theatre, among others—Ms. Delany does a you-name-it of various acting jobs, including audiobook narration.

About the Narrators

Bob Barner was born in Arkansas, grew up in the midwest and now lives in Northern California. He graduated from the Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, Ohio where he received a BFA. He has worked as an art therapist and an art director at several advertising agencies and design studios and has also assisted Al Capp with the writing and drawing for the popular comic strip Li’l Abner.

Joe Bevilacqua, also known as Joe Bev, is a public radio producer and radio theater dramatist. However, his career has taken him into every aspect of show business, including stage, film, and television as a producer, director, writer, author, actor, journalist, documentarian, and even cartoonist. He is also a member of the Metropolitan Opera Company in New York City.

Bleak December Inc. is a multimedia company founded by Canadian actor and filmmaker Anthony D.P. Mann.