History audiobooks

Young Mandela

By: David James Smith

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 14 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Nelson Mandela is well known throughout the world as a heroic leader who symbolizes freedom and moral authority. He is fixed in the public mind as the world’s elder statesman—the gray-haired man with a kindly smile who spent twenty-seven years in prison before becoming the first black president of South Africa.But Nelson Mandela was not always... Read more

California

By: Kevin Starr

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

Length: 13 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

From the age of exploration to the age of Arnold, the Golden State’s premier historian distills the entire sweep of California’s history into one splendid volume. Kevin Starr covers it all: Spain’s conquest of the native peoples of California in the early sixteenth century and the chain of missions that helped that country exert control over the... Read more

Escaping the Trap

By: Roy E. Appleman

Narrated by: Kevin Foley

Length: 17 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

After its successful landing at Inchon and capture of Seoul in September 1950, the U.S. X Corps was joined by Eighth Army, and many people expected the two commands to be combined into one. Instead, General MacArthur ordered the X Corps to load onto ships and travel around the peninsula to northeastern Korea and the port city of Wonsan, which... Read more

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

By: Mark Twain

Narrated by: Michael Anthony

Length: 20 hours 18 minutes

Abridged: No

Mark Twain's daughter, Susy, wrote: "Papa…doesn't like to go to church at all, why I never understood, until just now, he told us the other day that he couldn't bear to hear any one talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself talk for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in joke, but I've no dought [sic] it was founded... Read more

Two Years before the Mast

By: Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Narrated by: Bernard Mayes

Length: 16 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Richard Henry Dana referred to this book as "a voice from the sea." Influencing such authors as Conrad and Melville, it has become a maritime classic that has inflicted legions of men with a passion for the sea.Dana, a law student turned sailor for health reasons, sailed in 1834 on the brigPilgrimfor a voyage from Boston around Cape Horn to... Read more

Original Meanings

By: Jack N. Rakove

Narrated by: Steven Weber

Length: 17 hours 49 minutes

Abridged: No

What did the U.S. Constitution originally mean, and how can we recover the intentions of its framers? These questions, which resound throughout today’s most heated legal and political controversies, lie at the heart of Jack N. Rakove’s splendidly readable work of historical analysis. In Original Meanings, he traces the complex weave of ideology... Read more

Wicked River

By: Lee Sandlin

Narrated by: Jeff McCarthy

Length: 10 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: No

Acclaimed journalist and author Lee Sandlin delivers a riveting glimpse of a dangerous and colorful place in America's historical landscape-the Mississippi River of the 19th century. Long before it was dredged into a shipping channel or romanticized into myth, the untamed Mississippi-the lifeblood of communities that rose and fell along its... Read more

Dear Mr Bigelow

By: Frances Woodsford

Narrated by: Patience Tomlinson

Length: 12 hours 57 minutes

Abridged: No

Dear Mr Bigelow is an enchanting selection of weekly 'pen-pal' letters written between 1949 and 1961 from an unmarried woman working at the Pier Approach Baths in Bournemouth, to a wealthy American widower, living on Long Island, New York. Frances Woodsford and Commodore Paul Bigelow never met, and there was no romance - she was in her forties... Read more

Driven West

By: A. J. Langguth

Narrated by: Mel Foster

Length: 14 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

By the acclaimed author of the classic Patriots and Union 1812, this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation. After the War of 1812, Presidents Monroe, Jackson, Van Buren, and Polk led the country to its Manifest Destiny across the continent, but the forces and hostility... Read more

The Golden Thirteen

By: Paul Stillwell

Narrated by: Alan Bomar Jones

Length: 8 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

In January 1944, sixteen black enlisted men gathered at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Illinois to begin a cram course that would turn them into the U.S. Navy's first African American officers on active duty. The men believed that if they failed they would set back the course of racial justice, so they banded together and all sixteen... Read more

Colonel Roosevelt

By: Edmund Morris

Narrated by: Mark Deakins

Length: 24 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK •  “Colonel Roosevelt is compelling reading, and [Edmund] Morris is a brilliant biographer who practices his art at the highest level. . . . A moving, beautifully rendered account.”—Fred Kaplan, The Washington Post

This biography by Edmund Morris, the Pulitzer Prize– and National Book... Read more

The Essential American

By: Jackie Gingrich Cushman & Newt Gingrich

Narrated by: Vanessa Hart & Jim Meskimen

Length: 12 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

More than ever, Americans are realizing that if we want to keep this country great, we must be citizen-patriots. And here’s the handbook every citizen-patriot needs: The Essential American, featuring the fundamental documents of our nation’s history.Compiled by syndicated columnist Jackie Gingrich Cushman and featuring a foreword by her... Read more

Pirates of Barbary

By: Adrian Tinniswood

Narrated by: Clive Chafer

Length: 11 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

It's easy to think of piracy as a romantic way of life long gone—if not for today's frightening headlines of robbery and kidnapping on the high seas. Pirates have existed since the invention of commerce itself, but they reached the zenith of their power during the 1600s, when the Mediterranean was the crossroads of the world and pirates were the... Read more

The Twilight Warriors

By: Robert Gandt

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 11 hours 53 minutes

Abridged: No

April 1945. The end of World War II finally appears to be nearing. The Nazis are collapsing in Europe, and the Americans are vastly overpowering the Japanese in the Pacific. For a group of pilots in their early twenties who were trained during the twilight of the war, the biggest concern is that they'll never actually see real action and will go... Read more

A History of Air Warfare

By: John Andreas Olsen

Narrated by: Stephen Van Doren

Length: 20 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

This one-volume anthology provides a comprehensive analysis of the role that air power has played in military conflicts over the past century. Comprising sixteen essays penned by a global cadre of leading military experts, A History of Air Warfare chronologically examines the utility of air power from World War I to the second Lebanon war,... Read more

The Kennedy Detail

By: Gerald Blaine & Lisa McCubbin

Narrated by: Alan Sklar

Length: 17 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

Even today, almost five decades after John F. Kennedy was slain, the public continues to be captivated by the "Kennedy Curse" and new theories about what really happened on that fateful day in 1963. For nearly fifty years former Secret Service agent Clint Hill has lived with the unimaginable guilt of losing a president on his watch and has... Read more

The Fall of the House of Zeus

By: Curtis Wilkie

Narrated by: Sean Runnette

Length: 13 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

The Fall of the House of Zeus tells the story of Dickie Scruggs, arguably the most successful plaintiff's lawyer in America. A brother-in-law of Trent Lott, the former U.S. Senate majority leader, Scruggs made a fortune taking on mass tort lawsuits against "Big Tobacco" and the asbestos industries. He was hailed by Newsweek as a latter-day Robin... Read more

The Empire Strikes Out

By: Robert Elias

Narrated by: William Hughes

Length: 15 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

"It's our game…America's game: it has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution's laws, [and] is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."—Walt Whitman on baseballIs the face of American baseball throughout the world that of goodwill... Read more

All the Devils Are Here

By: Bethany McLean & Joe Nocera

Narrated by: Dennis Boutsikaris

Length: 15 hours 29 minutes

Abridged: No

The New York Times bestseller hailed as "the best business book of 2010" (Huffington Post).  As soon as the financial crisis erupted, the finger-pointing began. Should the blame fall on Wall Street, Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue? On greedy traders, misguided regulators, sleazy subprime companies, cowardly legislators, or clueless home... Read more

The Peloponnesian War

By: Donald Kagan

Narrated by: Bill Wallace

Length: 19 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

For almost three decades at the end of the fifth century BC the ancient world was torn apart in a conflict that was, within its historical context, as dramatic, divisive, and destructive as the great world wars of the twentieth century. The Peloponnesian War pitted Greek against Greek: the Athenians, with their glorious empire, rich legacy of... Read more

Seabiscuit

By: Laura Hillenbrand

Narrated by: George Newbern

Length: 13 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken comes a universal underdog story about the horse who came out of nowhere to become a legend.

Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than ... Read more

Hero - Abridged

By: Michael Korda

Narrated by: Robin Sachs

Length: 14 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: Yes

From Michael Korda, author of the New York Times bestselling Eisenhower biography Ike and the captivating Battle of Britain book With Wings Like Eagles, comes the critically-acclaimed definitive biography of T. E. Lawrence—the legendary British soldier, strategist, scholar, and adventurer whose exploits as “Lawrence of Arabia” created a legacy... Read more

Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance

By: Richard W. Unger

Narrated by: John Pruden

Length: 11 hours 14 minutes

Abridged: No

Modern beer has little in common with the drink that carried that name through the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Looking at a time when beer was often a nutritional necessity, was sometimes used as medicine, could be flavored with everything from the bark of fir trees to thyme and fresh eggs, and was consumed by men, women, and children alike,... Read more

Civil War Battles

By: Tim McNeese

Narrated by: Brett Barry

Length: 3 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Civil War Battles is an informative introduction to the subject. For four straight years, the people of the United States fought against one another in a brutal civil war that resulted in the deaths of approximately 620,000 men in uniform. Between 1861 and 1865, more Americans died during this bloody conflict than in all other American wars... Read more