History audiobooks

George Washington

By: Paul Johnson

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 3 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: No

Paul Johnson’s History of the American People has been this always stimulating author’s most widely read book to date. Now Johnson gives us his concise portrait of the great founding American, George Washington, in a brilliant, sharply etched portrait that is full of surprising insights. Washington is seen as one of the most important authors of... Read more

Black like Me

By: John Howard Griffin

Narrated by: Ray Childs

Length: 7 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Writer John Howard Griffin decided to perform an experiment fifty years ago. In order to learn firsthand how one race could withstand the second class citizenship imposed on it by another, he dyed his white skin dark, left his family, and traveled to the South to live as a black man. What began as scientific research ended up changing his life... Read more

A Most Dangerous Method

By: John Kerr

Narrated by: Peter Berkrot

Length: 22 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1907 Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung began what promised to be both a momentous collaboration and the deepest friendship of each man's life. Six years later they were bitter antagonists, locked in a savage struggle that was as much personal and emotional as it was theoretical and professional. In between them stood a young woman named... Read more

You'll Be Sor-ree!

By: Sid Phillips

Narrated by: Dan John Miller

Length: 5 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Sid Phillips knew he was a long way from his home in Mobile, Alabama, when he plunged into the jungles of Guadalcanal in August 1942. A mortarman with the same company of the 1st Marine Division as Helmet for My Pillow author Robert Leckie, Sid was a seventeen-year-old kid when he entered combat. By the time he returned home some two years... Read more

The Vanderbilts

By: Jerry E. Patterson

Narrated by: Ray Childs

Length: 6 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

In The Vanderbilts, the family’s astounding story is told in full: from the farmstead beginnings of the Commodore on Staten Island to the pinnacle of wealth, fame, and social standing achieved by the legendary Vanderbilt ladies—Consuelo, Alva, Grace, Gertrude, and Gloria. The text traces the commercial machinations that established their fortune... Read more

The Time of Our Lives

By: Tom Brokaw

Narrated by: Tom Brokaw

Length: 7 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

Tom Brokaw, known and beloved for his landmark work in American journalism and for the New York Times bestsellers The Greatest Generation and Boom!, now turns his attention to the challenges that face America in the new millennium, to offer reflections on how we can restore America’s greatness.
 
“What happened to the America I thought I knew?”... Read more

Jack Kennedy

By: Chris Matthews

Narrated by: Holter Graham

Length: 13 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

“Filled with the vitality and spirit that made Jack Kennedy such a magical figure. Chris Matthews shows the cunning and determination beneath that magic. It’s an awesome and delightful book.” —Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs

“What was he like?”

Jack Kennedy said the reason people read biography is to answer that basic question. What was... Read more

Mary Boleyn

By: Alison Weir

Narrated by: Maggie Mash

Length: 13 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

The first full-scale biography of Mary Boleyn, one of the most misunderstood figures of the Tudor age
Mary Boleyn was the mistress of two kings, Francois I of France and Henry VIII of England, and sister to Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII's second wife. In this astonishing and riveting biography, Alison Weir's extensive research gives a new and detailed... Read more

The Tudors (BBC History Magazine)

By: Dr David Musgrove

Narrated by: Dr David Musgrove

Length: 2 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

To accompany the August 2011 issue of BBC History Magazine, expert historians discuss the life and reigns of the five Tudor monarchs with BBC History Magazine editor Dr David Musgrove.

Dr Steven Gunn, of Oxford University, discusses Henry VII. Professor George Bernard, of Southampton University, introduces us to Henry VIII. Reading University’s... Read more

The Double Life of Pocahontas

By: Jean Fritz

Narrated by: Melissa Hughes

Length: 2 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Pocahontas was the special favorite of her father, the great chief Pawhatan. And when the English settlers came to Virginia, she became a "sister" to Captain John Smith, who was "adopted" into her tribe. She was permitted to move freely between the Indian and white worlds, and her life seemed perfect. But soon there was trouble. Pocahontas was... Read more

The Great Fire

By: Jim Murphy

Narrated by: Taylor Mali

Length: 2 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

The Great Fire of 1871 was one of the most colossal disasters in American history—with damage so profound that few people believed the city of Chicago could ever rise again. By weaving personal accounts of actual survivors together with careful research, Jim Murphy constructs a riveting and dramatic narrative, ultimately revealing how the human... Read more

Civilization

By: Niall Ferguson

Narrated by: Niall Ferguson

Length: 13 hours 5 minutes

Abridged: No

The rise to global predominance of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the past five hundred years. All over the world, an astonishing proportion of people now work for Western-style companies, study at Western-style universities, vote for Western-style governments, take Western medicines, wear Western... Read more

Pearl Harbor Christmas

By: Stanley Weintraub

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

Length: 5 hours 38 minutes

Abridged: No

Christmas 1941 came little more than two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The shock was worldwide. While Americans attempted to go about celebrating as usual, the reality of the just-declared war was on everybody’s mind.United States troops on Wake Island were battling a Japanese landing force and, in the Philippines, losing the fight to... Read more

Truth and Consequences

By: Laurie Sandell

Narrated by: Maggie Hoffman

Length: 10 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

In December 2008, the world watched as master financier Bernard L. Madoff was taken away from his posh Manhattan apartment in handcuffs, accused of swindling thousands of innocent victims-including friends and family-out of billions of dollars in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. Madoff went to jail; he will spend the rest of his life there. But... Read more

A Woman, a Man, and Two Kingdoms

By: Francis Steegmuller

Narrated by: Davina Porter

Length: 9 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

The 18th century's Age of Enlightenment in pre-Revolutionary France continues to fascinate us today. Steegmuller brings his scholarly talents to this collection of the letters of Mme. Louise d'Epinay, best-known for the treatment she received in Rousseau's Confessions. Eavesdropping on the writings of this intelligent woman, the listener gains... Read more

Hannibal

By: Ernle Bradford

Narrated by: Peter Jones

Length: 9 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

At the bloody battle of Cannae, he trounced a Roman army twice the size of his own. With his brothers, he subdued nearly all of Italy, Spain and Northern Africa. A cunning tactician, he secured victory for Bithynia at sea by catapulting poisonous snakes onto the decks of his enemy's ships. Biographer Ernle Bradford draws on the historical... Read more

One Click

By: Richard L. Brandt

Narrated by: Neil Shah

Length: 5 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

An insightful look at how Amazon really works and how its founder and CEO makes it happenAmazon’s business model is deceptively simple: make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: Buy now with one click. Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has... Read more

Ghost Wars

By: Steve Coll

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

Length: 26 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: No

The explosive first-hand account of America's secret history in Afghanistan

With the publication of Ghost Wars, Steve Coll became not only a Pulitzer Prize winner, but also the expert on the rise of the Taliban, the emergence of Bin Laden, and the secret efforts by CIA officers and their agents to capture or kill Bin Laden in Afghanistan after... Read more

Free Ride

By: Robert Levine

Narrated by: Byron Wagner

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

How did the newspaper, music, and film industries go from raking in big bucks to scooping up digital dimes? Their customers were lured away by the free ride of technology. Now, business journalist Robert Levine shows how they can get back on track.

On the Internet, “information wants to be free.” This memorable phrase shaped the online business... Read more

American Emperor

By: David O. Stewart

Narrated by: Andrew Garman

Length: 11 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

A spellbinding storyteller, historian David O. Stewart traces the canny and charismatic Aaron Burr from the threshold of the presidency in 1800 to his duel with Alexander Hamilton. Stewart recounts Burr's efforts to carve out an empire, taking listeners across the American West as the renegade vice president schemes with foreign ambassadors, the... Read more

Sharon

By: Gilad Sharon

Narrated by: Rich Topol

Length: 18 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

Drawn from extensive personal archives and filled withstartling revelations, the definitive biography of Ariel Sharon illuminates hislife and work from the penetrating perspective of his youngest son, Gilad Sharon—one of his father’s closest confidants.Readers of George W. Bush’s Decision Points, Tony Blair’s A Journey,Yitzhak Rabin’s The Rabin... Read more

The Lost Empire of Atlantis

By: Gavin Menzies

Narrated by: Gildart Jackson

Length: 11 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

“MENZIES [IS] PROPOUNDING ONE OF THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY IDEAS IN THE HISTORY OF HISTORY.” —New York Times Magazine
New York Times bestselling historian Gavin Menzies presents newly uncovered evidence revealing, conclusively, that “the lost city of Atlantis” was not only real but also at the heart of a highly advanced global empire that reached... Read more

Pearl Harbor

By: Steven M. Gillon

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 6 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously called December 7, 1941, "a date which will live in infamy." History would prove him correct; the events of that day—when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor—ended the Great Depression, changed the course of FDR's presidency, and swept America into World War II.

In Pearl Harbor, acclaimed historian Steven M. Gillon... Read more

Ben-Gurion

By: David Landau & Shimon Peres

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 7 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Shimon Peres was in his early twenties when he first met David Ben-Gurion. Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the "Old Man," as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke... Read more