History

Barracoon

The Story of the Last "Black Cargo"

By: Zora Neale Hurston
Narrated by: Robin Miles
Length: 3 hours 49 minutes

“Barracoon would be a significant document were it only about Cudjo (Kossola) Lewis, the last survivor of the last recorded slave ship to the US. His memories, recounted orally, preserve a trans-atlantic history that has long-been suppressed. But Barracoon is also a story about Zora Neale Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance, and the reclamation of... Read more

The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

By: Thomas King
Narrated by: Lorne Cardinal
Length: 9 hours 56 minutes

The Inconvenient Indian is at once a “history” and the complete subversion of a history—in short, a critical and personal meditation that the remarkable Thomas King has conducted over the past 50 years about what it means to be “Indian” in North America.

Rich with dark and light, pain and magic, this book distills the insights gleaned from... Read more

Deaths of Sybil Bolton

Oil, Greed, and Murder on the Osage Reservation

By: Dennis McAuliffe, Kalani Queypo & David Grann
Length: 12 hours 39 minutes

A true story of greed and murder of Native Americans by their countrymenJournalist Dennis McAuliffe Jr. grew up believing that his Osage Indian grandmother, Sybil Bolton, had died an early death in 1925 from kidney disease. It was only by chance that he learned the real cause was a gunshot wound, and that her murder may well have been engineered... Read more

Dead Famous

An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen

By: Greg Jenner
Narrated by: Greg Jenner
Length: 12 hours 45 minutes

Celebrity, with its neon glow and selfie pout, strikes us as hypermodern. But the famous and infamous have been thrilling, titillating, and outraging us for much longer than we might realize. Whether it was the scandalous Lord Byron, whose poetry sent female fans into an erotic frenzy; or the cheetah-owning, coffin-sleeping, one-legged French... Read more

King Leopold's Ghost

By: Adam Hochschild
Narrated by: Geoffrey Howard
Length: 12 hours 41 minutes

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company’s ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo, Leopold II’s vast new African colony. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and... Read more

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

Stories from Rwanda

By: Philip Gourevitch
Narrated by: Philip Gourevitch
Length: 10 hours 23 minutes

This program is read by the author.

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award*

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families is an unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity.

This remarkable audiobook chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring... Read more

Colorization

One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World

By: Wil Haygood
Narrated by: Cary Hite
Length: 17 hours 36 minutes

ANEW YORK TIMESCRITICS'TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR • BOOKLISTS' EDITOR'S CHOICE •ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

“At once a film book, a history book, and a civil rights book.… Without a doubt, not only the very best film book [but] also one of the best books of the year in any genre. An absolutely essential read.” —Shondaland

This unprecedented... Read more

The 1619 Project

A New Origin Story

By: Caitlin Roper, Ilena Silverman & Jake Silverstein
Narrated by: Nikole Hannah-Jones & Full Cast
Length: 18 hours 56 minutes

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A dramatic expansion of a groundbreaking work of journalism, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story offers a profoundly revealing vision of the American past and present.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Marie Claire
 
In late August 1619, a ship arrived in the British colony of... Read more

Millionaire

The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance

By: Janet Gleeson
Narrated by: Esther Wane
Length: 8 hours

On the death of France's most glorious king, Louis XIV, in 1715, few people benefited from the shift in power more than the intriguing financial genius from Edinburgh, John Law. Law had proposed to the English monarch that a bank be established to issue paper money with the credit based on the value of land. But Queen Anne was not about to take... Read more

Money

The True Story of a Made-Up Thing

By: Jacob Goldstein
Narrated by: Jacob Goldstein
Length: 5 hours 37 minutes

The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs.
Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped... Read more

The Spartans

By: Andrew J. Bayliss
Narrated by: Shaun Grindell
Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

The image of Sparta, and the Spartans, is one dyed indelibly into the public consciousness: musclebound soldiers with long hair and red cloaks, bearing shiny bronze shields emblazoned with the Greek letter lambda. "This is Sparta!", bellows Leonidas on the silver screen, as he decides to lead his 300 warriors to their deaths at Thermopylae. But... Read more

LSD — The Wonder Child

The Golden Age of Psychedelic Research in the 1950s

By: Thomas Hatsis
Narrated by: Thomas Hatsis
Length: 11 hours 38 minutes

• Explores the different groups--from research labs to the military--who were seeking how best to utilize LSD and other promising psychedelics like mescaline

• Reintroduces forgotten scientists like Robert Hyde and Rosalind Heywood

• Looks at the CIA’s notorious top-secret mind-control program MKUltra

• Reveals how intellectuals, philosophers,... Read more

How Rome Fell

Death of a Superpower

By: Adrian Goldsworthy
Narrated by: Derek Perkins
Length: 18 hours 27 minutes

In AD 200, the Roman Empire seemed unassailable, its vast territory accounting for most of the known world. By the end of the fifth century, Roman rule had vanished in western Europe and much of northern Africa, and only a shrunken Eastern Empire remained.

This was a period of remarkable personalities, from the philosopher-emperor Marcus... Read more

American Heiress

The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst

By: Jeffrey Toobin
Narrated by: Paul Michael
Length: 15 hours 23 minutes

From New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Nine and The Run of His Life: The People v. O. J. Simpson, the definitive account of the kidnapping and trial that defined an insane era in American history
 
On February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, a sophomore in college and heiress to the Hearst family fortune, was kidnapped by a ragtag... Read more

Don't Forget Us Here

Lost and Found at Guantanamo

By: Mansoor Adayfi
Narrated by: Roxanna Hope Radja & Mansoor Adayfi
Length: 12 hours 25 minutes

“Don’t Forget Us Here is a harrowing story of an innocent man being held for 15 years in Guantanamo Bay. I listened to this book on Libro.fm, and I think listening to the audiobook version may have been an even more immersive experience than reading the book. The narrator does a great job of recreating each scene, from the revoltingly inhumane... Read more

Darkest Hour

How Churchill Brought England Back from the Brink

By: Anthony McCarten
Narrated by: John Lee
Length: 6 hours 34 minutes

From the acclaimed novelist and screenwriter of The Theory of Everything comes a revisionist look at the period immediately following Winston Churchill’s ascendancy to Prime Minister—soon to be a major motion picture starring Gary Oldman. May 1940. Britain is at war, Winston Churchill has unexpectedly been promoted to Prime Minister, the horrors... Read more

The Greatest Beer Run Ever

A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War

By: John "Chick" Donohue & J. T. Molloy
Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
Length: 5 hours 41 minutes

“Chickie takes us thousands of miles on a hilarious quest laced with sorrow, but never dull. You will laugh and cry, but you will not be sorry that you read this rollicking story.”—Malachy McCourtSoon to be a major motion picture written and directed by Peter Farrelly, who won two Academy Awards for Green Book—a wildly entertaining, feel-good... Read more

The Road to Jonestown

Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

By: Jeff Guinn
Narrated by: George Newbern
Length: 17 hours 30 minutes

2018 Edgar Award Finalist—Best Fact Crime

“A thoroughly readable, thoroughly chilling account of a brilliant con man and his all-too vulnerable prey” (The Boston Globe)—the definitive story of preacher Jim Jones, who was responsible for the Jonestown Massacre, the largest murder-suicide in American history, by the New York Times bestselling... Read more

Manson

The Life and Times of Charles Manson

By: Jeff Guinn
Narrated by: Jim Frangione
Length: 17 hours 22 minutes

The New York Times bestselling, authoritative account of the life of Charles Manson, filled with surprising new information and previously unpublished photographs: “A riveting, almost Dickensian narrative…four stars” (People).

More than forty years ago Charles Manson and his mostly female commune killed nine people, among them the pregnant... Read more

The Woman Who Smashed Codes

A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine who Outwitted America's Enemies

By: Jason Fagone
Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
Length: 13 hours 36 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLERNPR Best Book of 2017 “Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.”— The New York TimesJoining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her... Read more