History: It's not just WWII

Guns, Germs, and Steel

The Fates of Human Societies

By: Jared Diamond
Narrated by: Doug Ordunio
Length: 16 hours 19 minutes

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

All That She Carried

The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake

By: Tiya Miles
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 9 hours 29 minutes

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
 
WINNER: Frederick Douglass Book Prize, Harriet Tubman Prize,... 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

“This book was a true education, even coming after many recent books I’ve read on race in America. It details the history of African Americans, making clear not only how central it is to the history of the United States, but how revealing it is of our national character, past and present. Chapters of historical events alternate with poetry and... Read more

An African American and Latinx History of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #4

By: Paul Ortiz
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 9 hours 3 minutes

An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights

Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar... Read more

A Black Women's History of the United States

ReVisioning History: Book #5

By: Daina Ramey Berry & Kali Nicole Gross
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 10 hours 2 minutes

The award-winning Revisioning American History series continues with this “groundbreaking new history of Black women in the United States” (Ibram X. Kendi)—the perfect companion to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and An African American and Latinx History of the United States.

An empowering and intersectional history that... Read more

An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

By: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Narrated by: Laural Merlington
Length: 10 hours 18 minutes

Today in the United States, there are more than five hundred federally recognized Indigenous nations comprising nearly three million people, descendants of the fifteen million native people who once inhabited this land. The centuries-long genocidal program of the U.S. settler-colonial regimen has largely been omitted from history.




Roxanne... Read more

The Library Book

By: Susan Orlean
Narrated by: Susan Orlean
Length: 12 hours 8 minutes

“On the day I turned 2, Chernobyl was struck by disaster. Three days later, hidden among the news and chaos, the Los Angeles Public Library was in flames. Two thousand degrees, more than a million books destroyed or damaged, and the source of the fire unknown. Susan Orlean centers her book on the fire and then moves outward to include librarians... Read more

Gay Bar

Why We Went Out

By: Jeremy Atherton Lin
Narrated by: Jeremy Atherton Lin
Length: 7 hours 52 minutes

“Atherton Lin's part memoir, part gay history uses beautiful prose interspersed with biting nuggets of snark to commemorate the long tradition of queer gatherings - sexual, communal, important, and slowly fading. Infusing a dejected sense of feeling into his stories of sexualization, internalized homophobia, and otherness, Gay Bar: Why We Went... Read more

Palestine

A Four Thousand Year History

By: Nur Masalha
Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi
Length: 16 hours 1 minute

This rich and magisterial work traces Palestine's millennia-old heritage, uncovering cultures and societies of astounding depth and complexity that stretch back to the very beginnings of recorded history.



Starting with the earliest references in Egyptian and Assyrian texts, Nur Masalha explores how Palestine and its Palestinian identity have... Read more

The Burning

The Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921

By: Tim Madigan
Narrated by: Bill Andrew Quinn
Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

On the morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands marched across the railroad tracks dividing black from white in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and obliterated a black community then celebrated as one of America's most prosperous. Thirty-four square blocks of Tulsa's Greenwood community were reduced to smoldering rubble.



And now, eighty... Read more

Sea People

The Puzzle of Polynesia

By: Christina Thompson
Narrated by: Susan Lyons
Length: 11 hours 39 minutes

A blend of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel and Simon Winchester’s Pacific, a thrilling intellectual detective story that looks deep into the past to uncover who first settled the islands of the remote Pacific, where they came from, how they got there, and how we know.For more than a millennium, Polynesians have occupied the remotest... Read more

The Worst Hard Time

The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

By: Timothy Egan
Narrated by: Jacob York
Length: 12 hours 57 minutes

In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.
 
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through... Read more

The Silk Roads

A New History of the World

By: Peter Frankopan
Narrated by: Laurence Kennedy
Length: 24 hours 3 minutes

“This is history on a grand scale, with a sweep and ambition that is rare… A proper historical epic of dazzling range and achievement.” —William Dalrymple, The Guardian 
 
The epic history of the crossroads of the world—the meeting place of East and West and the birthplace of civilization

It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first... Read more

A History of the World in 6 Glasses

By: Tom Standage
Narrated by: Sean Runnette
Length: 7 hours 34 minutes

Throughout human history, certain drinks have done much more than just quench thirst. As Tom Standage relates with authority and charm, six of them have had a surprisingly pervasive influence on the course of history, becoming the defining drink during a pivotal historical period.



A History of the World in 6 Glasses tells the story of humanity... Read more

The Making of Asian America

A History

By: Erika Lee
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 15 hours 51 minutes

In the past fifty years, Asian Americans have helped change the face of America and are now the fastest growing group in the United States. The Making of Asian America tells the little-known history of Asian Americans and their role in American life, from the arrival of the first Asians in the Americas to the present-day.



An epic history of... Read more

Ghostland

An American History in Haunted Places

By: Colin Dickey
Narrated by: Jon Lindstrom
Length: 10 hours 47 minutes

One of NPR’s Great Reads of 2016

“A lively assemblage and smart analysis of dozens of haunting stories…absorbing…[and] intellectually intriguing.” —The New York Times Book Review

From the author of The Unidentified, an intellectual feast for fans of offbeat history that takes readers on a road trip through some of the country’s most infamously... Read more

African Europeans

An Untold History

By: Olivette Otele
Narrated by: Olivette Otele
Length: 8 hours 36 minutes

A dazzling history of Africans in Europe, revealing their unacknowledged role in shaping the continent One of the Best History Books of 2021 — SmithsonianConventional wisdom holds that Africans are only a recent presence in Europe. But in African Europeans, renowned historian Olivette Otele debunks this and uncovers a long history of Europeans... Read more

Assyria

The Rise and Fall of the World's First Empire

By: Eckart Frahm
Narrated by: Matthew Lloyd Davies
Length: 15 hours 3 minutes

A new history of Assyria, the ancient civilization that set the model for future empires 
 
At its height in 660 BCE, the kingdom of Assyria stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. It was the first empire the world had ever seen. Here, historian Eckart Frahm tells the epic story of Assyria and its formative role in global... Read more

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

By: Saidiya Hartman
Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
Length: 10 hours 5 minutes

“This intense, experimental history weaves together biography, archival record, photographs, and a kind of radical act of imagination to tell the stories of Black and queer women in Philadelphia & NYC at the turn of the century - their experiments in love, living, sex, family, gender, autonomy - all while under severe legal, societal, and... Read more

Four Lost Cities

A Secret History of the Urban Age

By: Annalee Newitz
Narrated by: Chloe Cannon
Length: 8 hours 14 minutes

“Analee Newitz looks at the fate of four so-called 'lost' cities on three continents in this book. They describe the way modern day archeologists are turning their findings into stories about what life was like in these early urban centers. For a book about falling civilizations, I found it incredibly optimistic! Political and environmental... Read more