History audiobooks

Four against the Arctic

By: David Roberts

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 10 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1743, a Russian ship was blown off course and trapped in ice off the coast of Svalbard (Spitzbergen), a barren Arctic island. Four sailors went ashore with only two days' supplies, and only twenty pounds of flour for food. Upon return they found the ship had vanished, apparently crushed and sunk by the ice. Blessed with courage and ingenuity,... Read more

Aristotle in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Aristotle wrote on everything from the shape of seashells to sterility, from speculations on the nature of the soul to meteorology, poetry, art, and even the interpretation of dreams. Apart from mathematics, he transformed every field of knowledge that he touched. Above all, Aristotle is credited with the founding of logic. When he first divided... Read more

New World Coming

By: Nathan Miller

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 18 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

Jazz, bootleggers, flappers, talkies, Model T Fords, Lindbergh's history-making flight over the Atlantic—the 1920s was also the decade of the hard-won vote for women, racial injustice, censorship, social conflict, and the birth of organized crime. With scandal and crime the lifeblood of the tabloids, it was the time when the culture of celebrity... Read more

Hume in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Hume reduced philosophy to ruins: he denied the existence of everything—except our actual perceptions themselves. I alone exist, he argued, and the world is nothing more than part of my consciousness. Yet we know that the world remains, and we go on as before. What Hume expressed was the status of our knowledge about the world, a world in which... Read more

Antietam

By: James Reasoner

Narrated by: Lloyd James

Length: 10 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

In early 1862, the Civil War comes within view of the Brannon family farm in Culpeper County, Virginia. The din of drilling soldiers sweeps over the quiet county seat, and another Brannon son, Mac, answers the call to arms.The long-anticipated spring offensive pitches the Union and Confederate armies against each other on the Virginia Peninsula,... Read more

True to Our Roots

By: Paul Dolan

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 6 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

Set against the colorful backdrop of the California wine industry, True to Our Roots is the story of how Paul Dolan led his California company, Fetzer Vineyards, to become a model for sustainable businesses everywhere. His respect for the environment, responsibility to his community, avoidance of chemicals, and humanistic approach to his... Read more

The Masters

By: Curt Sampson

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 10 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

The Masters golf tournament weaves a hypnotic spell. Success at Augusta National breeds legends, while failure can overshadow even the most brilliant of careers. But as Curt Sampson, author of the bestseller Hogan, reveals in The Masters, a cold heart beats behind the warm antebellum façade of this famous Augusta course.The Masters is an... Read more

Rothstein

By: David Pietrusza

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 13 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

The model for Meyer Wolfsheim from The Great Gatsby and Guys and Dolls' Nathan Detroit, Arnold Rothstein was an underworld genius, racketeer, rumrunner, political fixer, and criminal mastermind who, as F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, played "with the faith of fifteen million people with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe."David... Read more

Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 21 minutes

Abridged: No

We see our age as the greatest in human history, filled with seemingly unending originality. Yet such dynamism is not a necessary characteristic of great eras. Among the most long-lasting and stable civilizations was that of medieval Europe. There stasis was achieved, and with it a stability that permitted the development of structured thought... Read more

Promise of Glory

By: C. X. Moreau

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 11 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

This is the story of the battle of Antietam and the events leading up to the single bloodiest day in the entire Civil War, in which Union casualties topped 12,000 and Confederate casualties topped 11,000. It is also the story of such memorable figures of military history as Lee and McClellan, Burnside, Longstreet, Hooker, and Jackson, who took... Read more

Nietzsche in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

With Friedrich Nietzsche, philosophy was dangerous not only for philosophers but for everyone. Nietzsche ultimately went mad, but his ideas presaged a collective madness that had horrific consequences in Europe in the early 1900s. Though his philosophy is more one of aphorisms and insights than a system, it is brilliant, persuasive, and... Read more

Spinoza in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 12 minutes

Abridged: No

Spinoza’s brilliant metaphysical system was derived neither from reality nor experience. Starting from basic assumptions, with a series of geometric proofs he built a universe which was also God—one and the same thing, the classic example of pantheism. Although his system seems an oddity today, Spinoza’s conclusions are deeply in accord with... Read more

Jazz 101

By: John F. Szwed

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

Jazz 101 is a fascinating entr├®e into the world of jazz, for the beginner, novice, or jazz enthusiast. Szwed takes listeners on a tour of the varied and nonlinear history of jazz, exploring how it developed from an ethnic music to become America's most popular music and then part of the avant-garde in less than fifty years. Szwed's complete... Read more

Kierkegaard in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Kierkegaard wasn't really a philosopher in the academic sense, yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didn't write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live, and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and his or her existence, the "existing being." In Kierkegaard's view, this purely subjective... Read more

Kant in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Immanuel Kant taught and wrote prolifically about physical geography yet never traveled further than forty miles from his home in Königsberg. How appropriate it is then that in his philosophy he should deny that all knowledge was derived from experience. Kant's aim was to restore metaphysics. He insisted that all experience must conform to... Read more

Confucius in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Confucius taught a moral wisdom that would become a predominant social force in China from the second century BCE until the mid-twentieth century. It would appear that his aim was to turn his pupils into good government officials, but his quaint humanistic platitudes, maxims, and quasi-enigmatic anecdotes made spiritual fodder for the next two... Read more

Bums

By: Peter Golenbock

Narrated by: Raymond Todd

Length: 19 hours 33 minutes

Abridged: No

Before the team headed to Los Angeles in 1957, the Brooklyn Dodgers were one of the most colorful and beloved teams in baseball. Even today, they remain ingrained in the fabric of our national pastime. In Bums, bestselling author Peter Golenbock has compiled a fascinating oral history of the Ebbets Field heroes with recollections from former... Read more

Plato in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In an age when philosophers had scarcely glimpsed the horizons of the mind, a boy named Aristocles decided to forgo his ambitions as a wrestler. Adopting the nickname Plato, he embarked instead on a life in philosophy. In 387 BC he founded the Academy, the world's first university, and taught his students that all we see is not reality but... Read more

The Twentieth Maine

By: John J. Pullen

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 10 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

It was at Little Round Top that the volunteer regiment, the Twentieth Maine, with Joshua Chamberlain in command, performed one of the miracles of the Civil War and saved the left flank of the Union battle line. Outnumbered two to one, their front doubled back to the shape of a horseshoe. And with ammunition gone, the men fixed bayonets, charged,... Read more

Heidegger in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 27 minutes

Abridged: No

One of two major philosophical traditions of the twentieth century was Wittgenstein's linguistic analysis. The other, diametrically opposed, came from Heidegger, and his fundamental question: "What is the meaning of existence?" For Heidegger, this question was beyond the reach of reason and was the primary "given" of every individual life. To... Read more

Marx in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 23 minutes

Abridged: No

Karl Marx's devastating critique of capitalism, and his proposal of communism as the answer to the failings of the capitalist system, bore their greatest fruits in the twentieth century with the formation of the communist state in the Soviet Union. This great venture has now all but completely failed. Yet the force of the communist belief... Read more

Wonderful Memories of It’s a Wonderful Life

By: Jimmy Hawkins

Narrated by: Jimmy Hawkins

Length: 1 hour 31 minutes

Abridged: No

When the movie It’s a Wonderful Life opened in December 1946, it captured five Academy Award nominations. It also captured the hearts of millions of Americans. Over the past fifty years, It’s a Wonderful Life has become as much a holiday tradition as Thanksgiving dinner and the Christmas tree. For many people, Christmas just isn’t complete until... Read more

Sartre in 90 Minutes

By: Paul Strathern

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 1 hour 40 minutes

Abridged: No

During his lifetime, Jean-Paul Sartre enjoyed unprecedented popularity for a philosopher, due partly to his role as a spokesman for existentialism—at the opportune moment when this set of ideas filled the spiritual gap left amidst the ruins of World War II. Existentialism was a philosophy of action and showed the ultimate freedom of the... Read more

Scourge

By: Jonathan B. Tucker

Narrated by: John Lescault

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Smallpox, the only infectious disease to have been eradicated, was one of the most terrifying of human scourges. It covered the skin with hideous, painful boils, killed a third of its victims, and left the survivors disfigured for life. In this riveting, often terrifying look at the history of smallpox, Jonathan B. Tucker tells the story of this... Read more