History audiobooks

The Memory Palace

By: Nate DiMeo

Narrated by: Nate DiMeo, Jad Abumrad, Daniel Alarcón, Betsy ...

Length: 8 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

Incredible true stories reveal strange new magic in American history in this wondrous first book from the creator of the award-winning podcast The Memory Palace.

“One doesn’t often find the words imagination and history in the same sentence. Nate DiMeo has forever woven them together. The Memory Palace wants you to linger, to stay awhile, and... Read more

The Inventor's Secret

By: Suzanne Slade

Narrated by: Susie Berneis

Length: 47 minutes

Abridged: No

Both Thomas Edison and Henry Ford started off as insatiably curious tinkerers. That curiosity led them to become inventors—with very different results. As Edison invented hit after commercial hit, gaining fame and fortune, Henry struggled to make a single invention (an affordable car) work. Witnessing Thomas's glorious career from afar, a... Read more

A Green Place to Be

By: Ashley Benham Yazdani

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 23 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1858, New York City was growing so fast that new roads and tall buildings threatened to swallow up the remaining open space. The people needed a green place to be—a park with ponds to row on and paths for wandering through trees and over bridges. When a citywide contest solicited plans for creating a park out of barren swampland, Calvert Vaux... Read more

Cue the Sun!

By: Emily Nussbaum

Narrated by: Gabra Zackman

Length: 15 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

The rollicking saga of reality television, a “sweeping” (The Washington Post) cultural history of America’s most influential, most divisive artistic phenomenon, from the Pulitzer Prize–winning New Yorker writer—“a must-read for anyone interested in television or popular culture” (NPR)

“Passionate, exquisitely told . . . With muscular prose and... Read more

The Story of the Saxophone

By: Lesa Cline-Ransome

Narrated by: Cary Hite

Length: 10 minutes

Abridged: No

You may think that the story of the saxophone begins with Dexter Gordon or Charlie Parker or on a street corner in New Orleans. It really began in 1840 in Belgium with a young daydreamer named Joseph-Antoine Adolphe Sax—a boy with bad luck but great ideas. Coretta Scott King Honoree Lesa Cline-Ransome unravels the fascinating history of how... Read more

When the Clock Broke

By: John Ganz

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

Length: 15 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

"John Ganz is the most important young political writer of his generation—just the one our dark moment needs." —Rick Perlstein

"Lively and kaleidoscopic." —Andrew Marantz, The New Yorker

"John Ganz belongs to a species of public intellectual that is almost extinct . . . When the Clock Broke is the first of what I hope will be a shelf of books that... Read more

Pandora's Jar

By: Natalie Haynes

Narrated by: Natalie Haynes

Length: 9 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

“Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!”—Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's TaleThe national bestselling author of A Thousand Ships returns with a fascinating, eye-opening take on the remarkable women at the heart of classical stories Greek... Read more

Let This Radicalize You

By: Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba

Narrated by: Diana Blue

Length: 10 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

What fuels and sustains activism and organizing when it feels like our worlds are collapsing? Let This Radicalize You is a practical and imaginative resource for activists and organizers building power in an era of destabilization and catastrophe.



Longtime organizers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes examine some of the... Read more

Patriot

By: Alexei Navalny

Narrated by: Matthew Goode

Length: 16 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The powerful and moving memoir of a fearless political opposition leader who paid the ultimate price for his beliefs.

"Patriot is by turns funny, fiery, reflective and tragic, laced with Navalny’s trademark wry humor and idealism....a gutting personal account from a husband and father facing the reality that he will... Read more

Femina

By: Janina Ramirez

Narrated by: Janina Ramirez

Length: 11 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

A groundbreaking reappraisal of medieval femininity, revealing why women have been written out of history and why it matters

The Middle Ages are seen as a bloodthirsty time of Vikings, saints and kings; a patriarchal society that oppressed and excluded women. But when we dig a little deeper into the truth, we can see that the “Dark” Ages were... Read more

Deadly Aim

By: Sally M. Walker

Narrated by: Darrell Dennis

Length: 5 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

More than 20,000 American Indians served in the Civil War, yet their stories have often been left out of the history books. In Deadly Aim, Sally M. Walker explores the extraordinary lives of Michigan’s Anishinaabe sharpshooters. These brave soldiers served with honor and heroism in the line of duty, despite enduring broken treaties, loss of... Read more

Empires of the Steppes

By: Kenneth W. Harl

Narrated by: Corey M. Snow

Length: 17 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

A narrative history of how Attila, Genghis Khan and the so-called barbarians of the steppes shaped world civilization.

The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced some of the world’s greatest conquerors: Attila the... Read more

How to Hide an Empire

By: Daniel Immerwahr

Narrated by: Luis Moreno

Length: 17 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

A pathbreaking history of the United States' overseas possessions and the true meaning of its empire We are familiar with maps that outline all fifty states. And we are also familiar with the idea that the United States is an "empire," exercising power around the world. But what about the actual territories-the islands, atolls, and... Read more

In the Garden of Beasts

By: Erik Larson

Narrated by: Stephen Hoye

Length: 12 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

“Larson is a marvelous writer...superb at creating characters with a few short strokes.”—New York Times Book Review
  
Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, the bestselling author of Devil in the White City turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power.
 
The time is... Read more

Prequel

By: Rachel Maddow

Narrated by: Rachel Maddow

Length: 13 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.
 
“A ripping read—well rendered, fast-paced and delivered with the same... Read more

The Radium Girls

By: Kate Moore

Narrated by: Angela Brazil

Length: 15 hours 52 minutes

Abridged: No

1917. As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium. It was a fun job, lucrative and glamorous—the girls themselves shone brightly in the dark, covered head to toe in the dust from the paint. They were the radium girls.


As the... Read more

Enemy Child

By: Andrea Warren

Narrated by: Caroline McLaughlin

Length: 3 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

One by one, things that Norm and his Japanese American family took for granted are taken away. In a matter of months they, along with everyone else of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast, are forced by the government to move to internment camps, leaving everything they have known behind. At the Heart Mountain internment camp in Wyoming,... Read more

A Brief History of Intelligence

By: Max Bennett

Narrated by: George Newbern

Length: 12 hours 17 minutes

Abridged: No

Equal parts Sapiens, Behave, and Superintelligence, but wholly original in scope, A Brief History of Intelligence offers a paradigm shift for how we understand neuroscience and AI. Artificial intelligence entrepreneur Max Bennett chronicles the five “breakthroughs” in the evolution of human intelligence and reveals what brains of the past can... Read more

Jesus and John Wayne

By: Kristin Kobes du Mez

Narrated by: Suzie Althens

Length: 12 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

How did a libertine who lacks even the most basic knowledge of the Christian faith win 81 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016? And why have white evangelicals become a presidential reprobate's staunchest supporters? These are among the questions acclaimed historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez asks in Jesus and John Wayne, which explains how... Read more

Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics: Series 1-4

By: Natalie Haynes

Narrated by: Natalie Haynes

Length: 7 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

All four series of Natalie Haynes’ BBC Radio 4 show combining comedy with classicism

Writer, broadcaster and recovering comedian Natalie Haynes mixes comedy and conversation to bring the ancient world entertainingly up to date in these four radio series. Each episode sees her profiling a key figure from ancient Greece and Rome, and, aided by her... Read more

The Day the World Came to Town

By: Jim DeFede

Narrated by: Ray Porter

Length: 6 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Perfect for fans of the musical Come From Away!When 38 jetliners bound for the United States were forced to land at Gander International Airport in Canada by the closing of U.S. airspace on September 11, the population of this small town on Newfoundland Island swelled from 10,300 to nearly 17,000. The citizens of Gander met the stranded... Read more

The Devil in the White City

By: Erik Larson

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 14 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth... Read more

Democracy Awakening

By: Heather Cox Richardson

Narrated by: Heather Cox Richardson

Length: 8 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

A New York Times Bestseller

A vital and urgent call to action about the precarious state of American democracy, charting its historical challenges and current threats, from one of our era’s most important and insightful historians, with a new afterword by the author.

“Magisterial.” –The Washington Post

“An excellent primer for anyone who needs the... Read more

Three Women

By: Lisa Taddeo

Narrated by: Tara Lynne Barr, Marin Ireland, Mena Suvari & L...

Length: 11 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

NOW A SERIES ON STARZ STARRING SHAILENE WOODLEY * BETTY GILPIN * DeWANDA WISE * GABRIELLE CREEVY * with BLAIR UNDERWOOD

“Staggeringly intimate...Groundbreaking.” —Entertainment Weekly
“A breathtaking and important book.” —Cheryl Strayed
“Extraordinary...A nonfiction literary masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Gilbert

#1 New York Times Bestseller and a... Read more