History audiobooks

Drift

By: Rachel Maddow

Narrated by: Rachel Maddow

Length: 7 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

The #1 New York Times bestseller that charts America’s dangerous drift into a state of perpetual war.

"One of my favorite ideas is, never to keep an unnecessary soldier," Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1792. Neither Jefferson nor the other Found­ers could ever have envisioned the modern national security state, with its tens of thousands of... Read more

Palestine in a World on Fire

By: Ilan Pappe & Katherine Natanel

Narrated by: Zehra Jane Naqvi

Length: 8 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

As more and more people align themselves with the Palestinian people, Palestine in a World on Fire provides the global perspective and analysis needed to inform how we forge ahead on this path of newfound solidarity. Editors Ilan Pappé and Katherine Natanel have gathered a collection of interviews that are intimate, challenging, and... Read more

On Killing

By: Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman

Narrated by: Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman

Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

The revised and updated edition of Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's modern classic about the psychology of combat, hailed by the Washington Post as "an illuminating account of how soldiers learn to kill and how they live with the experiences of having killed." In World War II, only 15 to 20 percent of combat infantry were willing to fire their rifles.... Read more

The Moscow Rules

By: Antonio J. Mendez & Jonna Mendez

Length: 7 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

A “devilishly fun” (New York Times Book Review) account of a deadly serious business: the undercover spies and the tactics they developed to survive the Cold War in Moscow, from legendary former-CIA operatives.
Antonio Mendez and his future wife Jonna were CIA operatives working to spy on Moscow in the late 1970s, at one of the most dangerous... Read more

Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister

By: Jung Chang

Narrated by: Catherine Ho

Length: 12 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the center of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history.

Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the 'Father of China', Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao's... Read more

Goddess of Anarchy

By: Jacqueline Jones

Narrated by: Nylsa Smallwood

Length: 14 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived

Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert... Read more

The Soviet Century

By: Karl Schlögel

Narrated by: Ciaran Saward

Length: 29 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

An encyclopedic and richly detailed history of everyday life in the Soviet Union The Soviet Union is gone, but its ghostly traces remain, not least in the material vestiges left behind in its turbulent wake. What was it really like to live in the USSR? What did it look, feel, smell, and sound like? In The Soviet Century, Karl Schlögel, one of... Read more

Reasons Not to Worry

By: Brigid Delaney

Narrated by: Blazey Best

Length: 8 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

In this heartfelt and soul-searching work, brimming with warmth, humor, and insight, the beloved Guardian columnist spends a year exploring how to pursue a rich and meaningful life, turning to the wisdom of the Stoics for insights into the deepest questions of existence. Like many people today, Brigid Delaney was searching for answers to... Read more

The Gay Revolution

By: Lillian Faderman

Narrated by: Donna Postel

Length: 29 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

The fight for gay, lesbian, and trans civil rights—the years of outrageous injustice, the early battles, the heartbreaking defeats, and the victories beyond the dreams of the gay rights pioneers—is the most important civil rights issue of the present day. Based on rigorous research and more than 150 interviews, The Gay Revolution tells this... Read more

Question 7

By: Richard Flanagan

Narrated by: Richard Flanagan

Length: 7 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • SHORTLISTED FOR PRIX FÉMINA ETRANGER • LONGLISTED FOR PRIX MÉDICIS • An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with his life and family, and the role of fiction in our times

"Spectacular. . . A book that will have an... Read more

Long Walk to Freedom - Abridged

By: Nelson Mandela

Narrated by: Danny Glover

Length: 6 hours

Abridged: Yes

Read by Danny Glover, with an introduction by Kofi Annan.


Nelson Mandela is one of the great moral and political leaders of our time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. Since his triumphant release in 1990 from... Read more

The Escape Artist

By: Jonathan Freedland

Narrated by: Jonathan Freedland

Length: 11 hours 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award · New York Times Bestseller""A brilliant and heart-wrenching book, with universal and timely lessons about the power of information—and misinformation. Is it possible to stop mass murder by telling the truth?"" — Yuval Noah Harari, bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and Homo Deus:... Read more

The Rebel

By: Albert Camus

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

Length: 11 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

By one of the most profoundly influential thinkers of our century, The Rebel is a classic essay on revolution. For Albert Camus, the urge to revolt is one of the “essential dimensions” of human nature, manifested in man’s timeless Promethean struggle against the conditions of his existence, as well as the popular uprisings against established... Read more

The Ghost Forest

By: Greg King

Narrated by: Galen Osier

Length: 17 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

The definitive story of the California redwoods, their discovery and their exploitation, as told by an activist who fought to protect their existence against those determined to cut them down.

Every year millions of tourists from around the world visit California’s famous redwoods. Yet few who strain their necks to glimpse the tops of the... Read more

The Shortest History of Japan

By: Lesley Downer

Narrated by: Lucy Rayner

Length: 6 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

Zen, haiku, martial arts, sushi, anime, manga, film, video games . . . Japanese culture has long enriched our Western way of life. Yet from a Western perspective, Japan remains a remote island country that has long had a complicated relationship with the outside world.



Even at the nearest point, Japan—an archipelago strung like a necklace around... Read more

Basic Economics, Fifth Edition

By: Thomas Sowell

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

Length: 28 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

In this fifth edition of Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell revises and updates his popular book on commonsense economics, bringing the world into clearer focus through a basic understanding of the fundamental economic principles and how they explain our lives. Drawing on lively examples from around the world and from centuries of history, Sowell... Read more

A History Of Britain

By: Simon Schama

Narrated by: Timothy West

Length: 7 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

To look back at the past is to understand the present. In this vivid account of over 4,000 years of British history Simon Schama takes us on an epic journey which encompasses the very beginnings of the nation’s identity, when the first settlers landed on Orkney. From the successes and failures of the monarchy to the daily life of a Roman soldier... Read more

Catherine the Great & Potemkin

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Narrated by: Sophie Roberts

Length: 27 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

A widely acclaimed biography from the bestselling author of The Romanovs: "One of the great love stories of history” (The Economist) between Catherine the Great and the wildly flamboyant and talented Prince Potemkin. • "Captures the genius of two extraordinary Enlightenment figures—and of the age as well." —The Wall Street Journal

Catherine the... Read more

Nimitz at War

By: Craig L. Symonds

Narrated by: L.J. Ganser

Length: 14 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

From America's preeminent naval historian, the first full-length portrait in over fifty years of the man who won the war in the Pacific in World War Two.

Only days after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt tapped Chester W. Nimitz to assume command of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz transformed the devastated and... Read more

Sisters in Resistance

By: Tilar J. Mazzeo

Narrated by: Lisa Flanagan

Length: 8 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

In a tale as twisted as any spy thriller, discover how three women delivered critical evidence of Axis war crimes to Allied forces during World War II: “Mazzeo is a fascinating storyteller” (New York Journal of Books).
 
In 1944, news of secret diaries kept by Italy's Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, had permeated public consciousness. What... Read more

Demonic Grounds

By: Katherine McKittrick

Narrated by: Machelle Williams

Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women's geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material... Read more

Soul by Soul

By: Walter Johnson

Narrated by: Tom Perkins

Length: 10 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

Soul by Soul tells the story of slavery in antebellum America by moving away from the cotton plantations and into the slave market itself, the heart of the domestic slave trade. Taking us inside the New Orleans slave market, the largest in the nation, where 100,000 men, women, and children were packaged, priced, and sold, Walter Johnson... Read more

We Are Home

By: Ray Suarez

Narrated by: Ray Suarez

Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

From a veteran broadcaster and historian comes a richly reported portrait of the newest Americans, immigrants from all over the globe who are living all across the country, filled with their own voices. We are a nation of immigrants, never more than now. In recent decades, the numbers have skyrocketed, thanks to people coming from many... Read more

Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power

By: Amy Sonnie & James Tracy

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Length: 7 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Some of the most important and little-known activists of the 1960s were poor and working-class radicals. Inspired by the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers, and progressive populism, they started to organize significant political struggles against racism and inequality during the 1960s and into the 1970s.



Historians of the period have... Read more