History audiobooks

What If...? Vol 1 - Abridged

By: Robert Cowley

Narrated by: John Cunningham & Janet Zarish

Length: 4 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Historians and inquisitive laymen alike love to ponder the dramatic what-ifs of history. In these never-before-published essays, some of the keenest minds of our time ask the big, tantalizing questions: Where might we be if history had not unfolded the way it did? Why, how, and when was our fortune made real? The answers are surprising,... Read more

Corporate Creativity - Abridged

By: Alan G. Robinson & Sam Stern

Narrated by: Sam Stern

Length: 3 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Most companies know that their creative performance falls far short of potential, but they don't know what to do about it. Corporate Creativity has the answers. Read more

Kaddish - Abridged

By: Leon Wieseltier

Narrated by: Theodore Bikel

Length: 4 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: Yes

After his father died, Leon Wieseltier began to observe the traditional year-long period of mourning, going to the synagogue three times a day to recite the prayer known as the mourner's Kaddish. Struck by the profound, yet unexpected power of this practice and the poverty of his knowledge about it, Leon began to study the history and meaning of... Read more

All the Best, George Bush - Abridged

By: George H.W. Bush

Narrated by: Barbara Bush & George H.W. Bush

Length: 6 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Former President George H.W. Bush, revealed through his letters and writings from 1941 to 2010, is “worth its weight in gold…a valuable update of the life of an honorable American leader” (The Washington Post).

“Who knew that beneath George Bush’s buttoned-up propriety pulsed the warm heart of a prolific and occasionally poetic writer with a... Read more

Fire on the Mountain - Abridged

By: John N. Maclean

Narrated by: John N. Maclean

Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: Yes

On the morning of July 3, 1994, the site of a forest fire on Storm King Mountain in Colorado was wrongly recorded by the district's Bureau of Land Management office as taking place in South Canyon, thereby mislabeling forever one of the greatest tragedies in the annals of firefighting. That seemingly small human error foreshadowed the numerous... Read more

When Pride Still Mattered - Abridged

By: David Maraniss

Narrated by: David Maraniss

Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In this groundbreaking biography, David Maraniss captures all of football great Vince Lombardi: the myth, the man, his game, and his God.

More than any other sports figure, Vince Lombardi transformed football into a metaphor of the American experience. The son of an Italian immigrant butcher, Lombardi toiled for twenty frustrating years as a high... Read more

Havana Dreams

By: Wendy Gimbel

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 6 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the fascinating true story of four generations of Cuban women whose personal lives are woven with the story of their nation. At its center is Naty, a socialite born in 1925, who becomes intoxicated with Castro and his revolution. Here, published for the first time, are the letters they exchanged while Castro was in jail. Naty raises... Read more

Vietnam

By: Stanley Karnow

Narrated by: Edward Holland

Length: 27 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In this comprehensive history, Stanley Karnow demystifies the tragic ordeal of America’s war in Vietnam. The book’s central theme is that America’s leaders, prompted as much by domestic politics as by global ambitions, carried the United States into Southeast Asia with little regard for the realities of the region. Karnow elucidates the... Read more

Before the Wind - Abridged

By: Charles Tyng

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 4 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In seafaring literature, no fictional sailor's story can match this true, real-life adventure. Before the Wind is the memoir of early nineteenth-century sea captain Charles Tyng— from his childhood and love affair with the sea to his rise through the ranks to captain and ship owner in the tea and sugar trade. Before the Wind takes... Read more

Comrades - Abridged

By: Stephen E. Ambrose

Narrated by: Stephen E. Ambrose

Length: 3 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From the author of Undaunted Courage and D-Day comes this celebration of male friendship, taken both from the pages of history and from Ambrose’s own life.

Acclaimed historian Stephen Ambrose begins his examination with a glance inward—he starts this book with his brothers, his first and forever friends, and the shared experiences that join them... Read more

Nixon in Winter

By: Monica Crowley

Narrated by: Anna Fields

Length: 18 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Monica Crowley served as a personal assistant to former president Richard M. Nixon from July 1990 until his death in April 1994. This remarkable story of his final public and private years is based on full reconstructions of the conversations she had with him at the time. Nixon in Winter puts the reader behind the scenes with the former... Read more

Endgame - Abridged

By: Scott Ritter

Narrated by: Scott Ritter

Length: 3 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: Yes

WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT IRAQ?
Scott Ritter spent seven years in Iraq as an arms inspector for the United Nations. His 1998 resignation as the U.N.'s chief weapons inspector there made front-page headlines around the world. In Endgame, Ritter draws on his experiences to take us inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq and to explain where U.S. policy in... Read more

Black Hawk Down - Abridged

By: Mark Bowden

Narrated by: Joe Morton

Length: 4 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Ninety-nine elite American soldiers are trapped in the middle of a hostile city. As night falls, they are surrounded by thousands of enemy gunmen: Their wounded are bleeding to death. Their ammunition and supplies are dwindling. This is the story of how they got there -- and how they fought their way out.
This is the story of war.
Black Hawk Down... Read more

American Heritage's Great Minds of American History - Abridged

By: American Heritage

Narrated by: David McCullough & Stephen E. Ambrose

Length: 3 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In a series of fascinating interviews, today's best and brightest historians weigh in on the crucial moments in American history.

American Heritage's Great Minds of American History takes you to critical moments in American history, imbuing the past with an immediacy that goes well beyond the scope of formal histories. Roger Mudd's highly... Read more

Reconstruction

By: Eric Foner

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 30 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

The period following the Civil War was one of the most controversial eras in American history. This comprehensive account of the period captures the drama of those turbulent years that played such an important role in shaping modern America.Eric Foner brilliantly chronicles how Americans, black and white, responded to the unprecedented changes... Read more

Rodin

By: Frederic V. Grunfeld

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 27 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Auguste Rodin was not only the greatest sculptor—known for such works as The Thinker, The Kiss, The Hand of God, and dozens of others—but also one of the most remarkable personalities of modern times. He was an artist who outraged contemporaries with his disturbingly unfinished monuments, a sensualist who shocked France with his scandalous... Read more

A World without Heroes

By: George Roche

Narrated by: Robert Morris

Length: 12 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

An elegant essay in the tradition of Chesterton, Lewis, Merton, and Muggeridge, George Roche’s A World without Heroes rebukes secular humanism as the most dehumanizing force of our modern age. This ringing defense of Christianity—humorous, insightful, and uncompromising—takes careful aim at those ideas which have shriveled the will and faith of... Read more

The Death of Outrage - Abridged

By: William J. Bennett

Narrated by: Charlton Heston

Length: 3 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In this new, updated edition of a book heralded as a clarion call to the nation's conscience, William Bennett asks why we see so little public outrage in the fade of the evidence of deep corruption within Bill Clinton's administration.

The Death of Outrage examines the Monica Lewinsky scandal as it unfolded, from Clinton's denials that he had had... Read more

The Victors - Abridged

By: Stephen E. Ambrose

Narrated by: Cotter Smith

Length: 4 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From America’s preeminent military historian, Stephen E. Ambrose, comes the definitive telling of the war in Europe, from D-Day, June 6, 1944, to the end, eleven months later, on May 7, 1945.

This authoritative narrative account is drawn by the author himself from his five acclaimed books about that conflict, most particularly from the definitive... Read more

The Children's Book of America - Abridged

By: William J. Bennett

Narrated by: Elayne Glover Bennett, Hinton Battle & William ...

Length: 1 hour 32 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From the author of the bestselling book The Educated Child comes a compelling and inspiring book that answers any question a young child may have about America.

Where did America come from? What does it mean to be an American? What makes America great? No volume will provide more compelling and inspiring answers to our children's questions than... Read more

Band of Brothers - Abridged

By: Stephen E. Ambrose

Narrated by: Cotter Smith

Length: 4 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Stephen E. Ambrose’s classic New York Times bestseller and inspiration for the acclaimed HBO series about Easy Company, the ordinary men who became the World War II’s most extraordinary soldiers at the frontlines of the war's most critical moments. Featuring a foreword from Tom Hanks.

They came together, citizen soldiers, in the summer of 1942,... Read more

Stalingrad - Abridged

By: Antony Beevor

Narrated by: George Guidall

Length: 6 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: Yes

The Battle of Stalingrad was not only the psychological turning point of World War II: it also changed the face of modern warfare

Historians and reviewers worldwide have hailed Antony Beevor's magisterial Stalingrad as the definitive account of World War II's most harrowing battle.

In August 1942, Hitler's huge Sixth Army reached the city that... Read more

Forgotten Heroes

By: Susan Ware

Narrated by: Susan Ware

Length: 5 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

For Forgotten Heroes, thirty-five prominent historians chose their favorite stories of unsung American figures. From Johnny Appleseed and John Quincy Adams to abolitionist Sojourner Truth and Margaret Anderson, the publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses, these profiles remind us that history depends upon the great deeds of women and men, whether... Read more

Richard Ketchum: Saratoga

By: PBS NewsHour

Narrated by: PBS NewsHour

Length: 8 minutes

Abridged: No

From NewsHour Productions — Richard Ketchum: Saratoga, Turning Point of America’s Revolutionary War. Read more