History audiobooks

Ain't I a Woman

By: Bell Hooks

Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo

Length: 8 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must–read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, Hooks attempts to... Read more

Why Nations Fail

By: Daron Acemoglu & James A. Robinson

Narrated by: Dan Woren

Length: 17 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER • From two winners of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, “who have demonstrated the importance of societal institutions for a country’s prosperity”

“A wildly ambitious work that hopscotches through history and around the world to answer the very big question of why some countries get rich... Read more

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

By: John Berendt

Narrated by: Jeff Woodman, Will Damron & John Berendt

Length: 15 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An enormously engaging portrait of a most beguiling Southern city: “Elegant and wicked.... [This] might be the first true-crime book that makes the reader want to book a bed and breakfast for an extended weekend at the scene of the crime." —The New York Times Book Review

Shots rang out in Savannah's grandest mansion in the... Read more

Smoke and Ashes

By: Amitav Ghosh

Narrated by: Ranjit Madgavkar

Length: 12 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

When Amitav Ghosh began the research for his monumental cycle of novels the Ibis Trilogy, he was startled to learn how the lives of the nineteenth-century sailors and soldiers he wrote about were dictated not only by the currents of the Indian Ocean but also by the precious commodity carried in enormous quantities on those currents: opium. Most... Read more

Off with Her Head

By: Eleanor Herman

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 10 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

New York Times bestseller Eleanor Herman, author of Sex with Kings and Sex with Presidents, returns with another work of popular history, exploring the history of misogyny against women with power from Cleopatra to Kamala Harris.
Imagine Donald Trump as a woman, called Donna. Would Donna Trump have been viewed as blunt, honest, and refreshing?... Read more

Guns, Germs, and Steel

By: Jared Diamond

Narrated by: Doug Ordunio

Length: 16 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history.
 
Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped the modern world. From the viewpoint of an evolutionary... Read more

The Gulag Archipelago Volume 1

By: Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

Narrated by: Frederick Davidson

Length: 25 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —TimeVolume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

“The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a... Read more

A Ben Of All Trades

By: Michael J. Rosen & Matt Tavares

Narrated by: Qarie Marshall

Length: 44 minutes

Abridged: No

Young Benjamin Franklin wants to be a sailor, but his father won’t hear of it. The other trades he tries—candle maker, joiner, boot closer, turner—bore him through and through. Curious and inventive, Ben prefers to read, swim, fly his kite, and fly his kite while swimming. But each time he fails to find a profession, he takes some important bit... Read more

The 48 Laws of Power

By: Robert Greene

Narrated by: Richard Poe

Length: 23 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this multi-million-copy New York Times bestseller is the definitive manual for anyone interested in gaining, observing, or defending against ultimate control—from the author of The Laws of Human Nature.



In the book that People magazine proclaimed "beguiling" and "fascinating," Robert Greene and Joost... Read more

The Wretched of the Earth

By: Frantz Fanon

Narrated by: Aaron Goodson

Length: 9 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

The definitive English translation by Constance Farrington.   First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth offers a powerful exploration of race, colonialism, and the psychological impact of oppression. This seminal text has inspired generations of revolutionaries and activists, influencing movements from decolonization... Read more

The Indian Card

By: Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz

Narrated by: Amy Hall

Length: 7 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking and deeply personal exploration of Tribal enrollment, and what it means to be Native American in the United States

“Candid, unflinching . . . Her thorough excavation of the painful history that gave rise to rigid enrollment policies is a courageous gift to our understanding of contemporary Native life.” —The Whiting Foundation... Read more

Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen

By: Lili‘uokalani

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 9 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1893, Liliuokalani, the Queen of Hawaii, was deposed and five years later her nation became an incorporated territory of the United States.



Published shortly after these momentous events, her book Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen is an incredibly personal history of the islands that she was born to rule. Liliuokalani covers from her birth in... Read more

1491

By: Charles C. Mann

Narrated by: Darrell Dennis

Length: 16 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking study that radically alters our understanding of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans in 1492.

Traditionally, Americans learned in school that the ancestors of the people who inhabited the Western Hemisphere at the time of Columbus’s landing had crossed the Bering Strait twelve thousand years ago; existed mainly in... Read more

Barracoon

By: Zora Neale Hurston

Narrated by: Robin Miles

Length: 3 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

A major literary event: a never-before-published work from the author of the American classic Their Eyes Were Watching God that brilliantly illuminates the horror and injustices of slavery as it tells the true story of one of the last known survivors of the Atlantic slave trade—abducted from Africa on the last ""Black Cargo"" ship to arrive in... Read more

Furious Hours

By: Casey Cep

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Length: 11 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: No

ONE OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2019

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY Time, LitHub, Vulture, Glamour, O Magazine, Town and Country, Suspense Magazine, Inside Hook

New York Times Best Seller
 
“Compelling . . . at once a true-crime thriller, courtroom drama, and miniature biography of Harper Lee. If To Kill a Mockingbird was... Read more

The Undocumented Americans

By: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Narrated by: Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Length: 4 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • One of the first undocumented immigrants to graduate from Harvard reveals the hidden lives of her fellow undocumented Americans in this deeply personal and groundbreaking portrait of a nation.

“Karla’s book sheds light on people’s personal experiences and allows their stories to be told and their voices to be... Read more

Black AF History

By: Michael Harriot

Narrated by: Michael Harriot

Length: 15 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

From acclaimed columnist and political commentator Michael Harriot, a searingly smart and bitingly hilarious retelling of American history that corrects the record and showcases the perspectives and experiences of Black Americans.America’s backstory is a whitewashed mythology implanted in our collective memory. It is the story of the pilgrims on... Read more

The Bomber Mafia

By: Malcolm Gladwell

Narrated by: Malcolm Gladwell

Length: 5 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

In The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times bestsellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his... Read more

The Myth of American Idealism

By: Noam Chomsky & Nathan J. Robinson

Narrated by: Sean Patrick Hopkins

Length: 12 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

“For anyone wanting to find out more about the world we live in . . . there is one simple answer: read Noam Chomsky.” —The New Statesman

From one of the world’s most prominent thinkers comes an urgent warning of the threat that U.S. power poses to humanity’s future as well as a sharp indictment of both American foreign policy and the national... Read more

The Emperor of All Maladies

By: Siddhartha Mukherjee

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 22 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, adapted as a documentary from Ken Burns on PBS, this New York Times bestseller is “an extraordinary achievement” (The New Yorker)—a magnificent, profoundly humane “biography” of cancer. Now updated with three chapters illuminating the new... Read more

Age of Revolutions

By: Fareed Zakaria

Narrated by: Fareed Zakaria

Length: 13 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

The internationally bestselling author explores the revolutions—past and present—that define the chaotic, polarized, and unstable age in which we live.

Populist rage, ideological fracture, economic and technological shocks, geopolitical dangers, and an international system studded with catastrophic risk—the early decades of the 21st century may... Read more

Why We're Polarized

By: Ezra Klein

Narrated by: Ezra Klein

Length: 8 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022

One of Bill Gates’s “5 books to read this summer,” this New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller shows us that America’s political system isn’t broken. The truth is scarier: it’s working exactly as designed. In this “superbly researched” (The Washington Post) and timely book, journalist Ezra... Read more

Frostbite

By: Nicola Twilley

Narrated by: Nicola Twilley

Length: 12 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

"Engrossing...hard to put down." — The New York Times Book Review

“Frostbite is a perfectly executed cold fusion of science, history, and literary verve . . . as a fellow nonfiction writer, I bow down. This is how it's done.” — Mary Roach, author of Fuzz and Stiff

An engaging and far-reaching exploration of refrigeration, tracing its evolution... Read more

We Keep the Dead Close

By: Becky Cooper

Narrated by: Becky Cooper

Length: 15 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

A Recommended Book from: New York Times * Publisher's Weekly * Kirkus * BookRiot * Booklist * Boston Globe * Goodreads * Town & Country * Refinery29 * CrimeReads * Glamour

Dive into a "tour de force of investigative reporting" (Ron Chernow): a "searching, atmospheric and ultimately entrancing" (Patrick Radden Keefe) true crime narrative of an... Read more