United States Free Audio & Video

In American Notes, Rudyard Kipling, the Nobel Prize-winning author of the Jungle Book, visits the USA. As the travel-diary of an Anglo-Indian Imperialist visiting the USA, these American Notes offer an interesting view of America in the 1880s.

New York City, growing from the small Dutch commercial settlement of New Amsterdam early in the seventeenth century into a bustling multi-cultural city of more than 8 million and metropolis of more than 18 million by the twentieth century, is a place with many stories.

John Muir’s adventure guide for the Yosemite Valley.

John Muir (1838-1914) was one of the first modern preservationists. His letters, essays, and books telling of his adventures in nature, and wildlife, especially in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California, were read by millions and are still popular today.

The journal of nature-lover John Muir who spent the summer of 1869 walking California's Sierra Nevada range. From French Bar to Mono Lake and the Yosemite Valley, Muir was awestruck by everything he saw.

In 1879 John Muir went to Alaska for the first time. Its stupendous living glaciers aroused his unbounded interest, for they enabled him to verify his theories of glacial action.

A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf recounts Muir's walk of about 1,000 miles (1,600 km) from Indiana to Florida. This journal is the earliest of Muir's writings and autobiographically bridges the period between The Story of my Boyhood and Youth and My First Summer in the Sierra.

While describing his dining experiences throughout "Bohemian San Francisco," Clarence Edwords paints an historic panorama of California cuisine with all its cosmopolitan influences. Best of all, he offers tantalizing recipes culled from conversations with the master chefs of 1914 in "The City by the Bay."

Take a tour of the Big Apple and discover some of the city's premier cultural establishments.

Next to de Alexis de Tocquville's almost contemporary Democracy in America, Frances Trollope's work may be the most famous (or at least notorious) dissection of manners and morals of the United States.