History audiobooks

Theodore Rex - Abridged

By: Edmund Morris

Narrated by: Harry Chase

Length: 8 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The most eagerly awaited presidential biography in years, Theodore Rex is a sequel to Edmund Morris’s classic bestseller The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. It begins by following the new President (still the youngest in American history) as he comes down from Mount Marcy, New York, to take his emergency oath of office in Buffalo, one hundred years... Read more

Mark Twain - Abridged

By: Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns & Dayton Duncan

Narrated by: Bill Meisle

Length: 8 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn “the best book we’ve ever had. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing as good since.” Critical opinion of this book hasn’t dimmed since Hemingway uttered these words; as author Russell Banks says in these pages, Twain “makes possible an American literature which would otherwise not have been... Read more

Love Stories - Abridged

By: Larry King

Narrated by: Jill Eikenberry

Length: 4 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Larry King, whose previous books have sold more than one million copies, tells the moving and heartwarming stories of couples who met by chance and fell in love during World War II, based on his original interviews.

Poignant, inspiring, humorous, and unforgettable, these are the stories of men and women who, amid the chaos of a devestating war,... Read more

Reaching for Glory - Abridged

By: Michael R. Beschloss

Narrated by: Michael R. Beschloss

Length: 6 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Reaching for Glory lets us eavesdrop on LBJ's private, often tortured thoughts during the most crucial year of his presidency -- when his dreams of being hailed as the equal of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were destroyed by the war in Vietnam.
As Reaching for Glory opens, LBJ is campaigning for the greatest presidential landslide in... Read more

Germs - Abridged

By: Judith Miller

Narrated by: Murphy Guyer

Length: 6 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In this “engrossing, well-documented, and highly readable” (San Francisco Chronicle) New York Times bestseller, three veteran reporters draw on top sources inside and outside the U.S. government to reveal Washington's secret strategies for combating germ warfare and the deadly threat of biological and chemical weapons.

Today Americans have begun... Read more

What If...? Vol 2 - Abridged

By: Robert Cowley

Narrated by: Murphy Guyer

Length: 4 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: Yes

There is no surer way to feel the danger or the good fortune of our collective past than to contemplate those moments when the world's future hung in the balance. Our brightest historians speculate on some of these intriguing crossroads and the ways in which our lives might have been changed for the better -- or the worse.

These unabridged essays... Read more

Andy Warhol

By: Wayne Koestenbaum

Narrated by: Arthur Addison

Length: 6 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

In his bravura account of Warhol's life and work, scholar and culture critic Wayne Koestenbaum gets past the contradictions and reveals the man behind the blond wig and dark glasses. Nimbly weaving brilliant and witty analysis into an absorbing narrative, Koestenbaum makes a convincing case for Warhol as a serious artist, one whose importance... Read more

The Soul Of America

By: Jacob Needleman, Ph.D.

Narrated by: Michael Toms

Length: 56 minutes

Abridged: No

Jacob Needleman, internationally acclaimed author and philosopher, takes us on a journey back to the beginning of America and re-tells the story of America in a way that inspires and invites us to explore the lives of our forefathers and the sacred dimension of their founding principles. Read more

Riddle of the Compass - Abridged

By: Amir D. Aczel

Narrated by: Henry Leyva

Length: 3 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The story of the compass is shrouded in mystery and myth, yet most will agree it begins around the time of the birth of Christ in ancient China. A mysterious lodestone whose powers affected metal was known to the Chinese emperor. When this piece of metal was suspended in water, it always pointed north. This unexplainable occurrence led to the... Read more

The Big Enchilada

By: Stuart P. Stevens

Narrated by: Edward Holland

Length: TBA

Abridged: No

Six years ago he owned a baseball team. Now he's the leader of the free world. "The Big Enchilada" is a comic anthem to the wild and improbable crusade that propelled George W. Bush into the White House and to the close-knit group of Texans who made it happen, written by "the Bush campaign's Renaissance man" (Time magazine).

Writer and political... Read more

The Rehnquist Choice - Abridged

By: John W. Dean

Narrated by: Boyd Gaines & John W. Dean

Length: 5 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The explosive story of how William Rehnquist became a Supreme Court Justice, told by the only person who could have revealed this information—John W. Dean.

In 1971, William Rehnquist seemed the perfect choice to fill a seat on the United States Supreme Court. He was a young, well-polished lawyer who shared many of President Richard Nixon's... Read more

Currahee! - Abridged

By: Donald R. Burgett

Narrated by: David Guion

Length: 1 hour 44 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Seven days in hell

In June 1944, the Allies launched a massive amphibious invasion against Nazi-held France. But under the cover of darkness, a new breed of fighting man leapt from airplanes through a bullet-stitched, tracer-lit sky to go behind German lines. These were the Screaming Eagles of the newly formed 101st Airborne Division. Their job... Read more

When Genius Failed - Abridged

By: Roger Lowenstein

Narrated by: Roger Lowenstein

Length: 9 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: Yes

John Meriwether, a famously successful Wall Street trader, spent the 1980s as a partner at Salomon Brothers, establishing the best--and the brainiest--bond arbitrage group in the world. A mysterious and shy midwesterner, he knitted together a group of Ph.D.-certified arbitrageurs who rewarded him with filial devotion and fabulous profits. Then,... Read more

Nine Minutes, Twenty Seconds - Abridged

By: Gary M. Pomerantz

Narrated by: Boyd Gaines

Length: 6 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In August 1995, twenty-six passengers and a crew of three board a commuter plane in Atlanta headed for Gulfport, Mississippi. Shortly after takeoff they hear an explosion and some see a mangled engine lodged against the wing. From that moment, nine minutes and twenty seconds elapse until the crippled plane crashes in a west Georgia hayfield.... Read more

War in a Time of Peace - Abridged

By: David Halberstam

Narrated by: David Halberstam

Length: 5 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Pulitzer Prize­-winning journalist David Halberstam chronicles Washington politics and foreign policy in post­ Cold War America.

Evoking the internal conflicts, unchecked egos, and power struggles within the White House, the State Department, and the military, Halberstam shows how the decisions of men who served in the Vietnam War, and those who... Read more

Ava's Man - Abridged

By: Rick Bragg

Narrated by: Rick Bragg

Length: 5 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: Yes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South.

This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible... Read more

The Metaphysical Club - Abridged

By: Louis Menand

Narrated by: Henry Leyva

Length: 6 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Hardly a club in the conventional sense, the organization referred to in the title of this superb literary hybrid—part history, part biography, part philosophy— consisted of four members and probably existed for less than nine months. Yet its impact upon American intellectual life remains incalculable. Louis Menand masterfully weaves pivotal... Read more

Stephen Ambrose: The Wild Blue

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 11 minutes

Abridged: No

Gwen Ifill talks with historian and author Stephen Ambrose and World War II pilot and former Senator George McGovern about Ambrose's new book, The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B24's over Germany. Read more

The Wild Blue

By: Stephen E. Ambrose

Narrated by: Jeffrey DeMunn

Length: 8 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

Stephen E. Ambrose, acclaimed author of Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage, carries us along in the crowded and dangerous B-24s as their crews fought to destroy the German war machine during World War II.

The young men who flew the B-24s over Germany in World War II fought against horrific odds, and, in The Wild Blue, Ambrose recounts their... Read more

The Wild Blue - Abridged

By: Stephen E. Ambrose

Narrated by: Jeffrey DeMunn

Length: 4 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Stephen E. Ambrose, acclaimed author of Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage, carries us along in the crowded and dangerous B-24s as their crews fought to destroy the German war machine during World War II.

The young men who flew the B-24s over Germany in World War II fought against horrific odds, and, in The Wild Blue, Ambrose recounts their... Read more

Guns, Germs and Steel - Abridged

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 5 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

In this groundbreaking work, evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history’s broadest patterns. It is a story that spans 13,000 years of human history, beginning when Stone Age... Read more

Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle

By: Daniel Stashower

Narrated by: Richard Matthews

Length: 15 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

This compelling biography examines the extraordinary life and strange contrasts of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the struggling provincial doctor who became the most popular storyteller of his age when he created Sherlock Holmes. From his youthful exploits aboard a whaling ship, to his often stormy friendships with such figures as Harry Houdini and... Read more

Pete Hamill on Eddie Stanky - Abridged

By: Pete Hamill

Narrated by: Pete Hamill

Length: 14 minutes

Abridged: Yes

It's a cold spring day in 1944. A young Pete Hamill is with his father watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play the Boston Braves. The wartime teams are just dismal - many major league players are serving their country and the teams have been clogged with has-beens and guys that are 4-F. But Pete's father tells him to "watch this little guy." His name... Read more

Dante

By: R. W. B. Lewis

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 5 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

In Dante, Lewis traces the life and complex development—emotional, artistic, philosophical—of this supreme poet-historian, from his wanderings through Tuscan hills and splendid churches to his days as a young soldier fighting for democracy, to his civic leadership and years of embittered exile from the city that would fiercely reclaim him a... Read more