History audiobooks

The Sorrows of Empire

By: Chalmers Johnson

Narrated by: Tom Weiner

Length: 11 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

In the years after the Soviet Union imploded, the United States was described first as the globe’s “lone superpower,” then as a “reluctant sheriff,” next as the “indispensable nation,” and, in the wake of 9/11, as a “New Rome.” In this important national bestseller, Chalmers Johnson thoroughly explores the new militarism that is transforming... Read more

The Man Who Knew Infinity

By: Robert Kanigel

Narrated by: Humphrey Bower

Length: 17 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

In 1913, a young, unschooled Indian clerk named Srinivasa Ramanujan wrote a letter to G. H. Hardy, begging that pre-eminent English mathematician's opinion on several ideas he had about numbers.Hardy, realizing the letter was the work of a genius, arranged for Ramanujan to come to England. Thus began one of the most remarkable collaborations... Read more

Blowback

By: Chalmers Johnson

Narrated by: Tom Weiner

Length: 9 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

The term “blowback,” invented by the CIA, refers to the unintended consequences of American actions abroad. In this incisive and controversial book, Chalmers Johnson lays out in vivid detail the dangers faced by our overextended empire, which insists on projecting its military power to every corner of the earth and using American capital and... Read more

Write it When I'm Gone

By: Thomas M. DeFrank

Narrated by: Scott Brick

Length: 8 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

The New York Times bestseller?and the candid voice of an American president

In 1974, Newsweek correspondent Thomas M. DeFrank was interviewing Gerald Ford when the Vice President blurted out something astonishingly indiscreet. He then extracted a promise not to publish it. ?Write it when I?m dead,? Ford said? and thus began a thirty-two-year... Read more

What We Say Goes

By: Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian

Narrated by: Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian

Length: 5 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

An indispensable set of interviews on foreign and domestic issues with the bestselling author of Hegemony or Survival, "America's most useful citizen." (The Boston Globe)

In this collection of conversations, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: Iran's challenge to the United States, the deterioration of the... Read more

American Creation

By: Joseph J. Ellis

Narrated by: John H. Mayer

Length: 10 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: No

From the first shots fired at Lexington to the signing of the Declaration of Independence to the negotiations for the Louisiana Purchase, Joseph J. Ellis guides us through the decisive issues of the nation’s founding, and illuminates the emerging philosophies, shifting alliances, and personal and political foibles of our now iconic... Read more

For Liberty and Glory

By: James R. Gaines

Narrated by: Norman Dietz

Length: 21 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

They began as courtiers in a hierarchy of privilege, but history remembers them as patriot-citizens in a commonwealth of equals.



On April 18, 1775, a riot over the price of flour broke out in the French city of Dijon. That night, across the Atlantic, Paul Revere mounted the fastest horse he could find and kicked it into a gallop.



So began what... Read more

Who Was First?

By: Russell Freedman

Narrated by: L.J. Ganser

Length: 1 hour 45 minutes

Abridged: No

Historians still agree about the date of Columbus’s voyage. But did this European adventurer discover America? We now know that certain explorers from other parts of the globe set foot on American shores long before 1492–and that others may have done so. And “discovery” takes on a different meaning when the new land already has people living in... Read more

Shakespeare

By: Bill Bryson

Narrated by: Bill Bryson

Length: 5 hours 28 minutes

Abridged: No

Shakespeare: The Illustrated Edition is an exquisitely illustrated, updated edition of Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare that takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship. With more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, and... Read more

Marco Polo

By: Laurence Bergreen

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 16 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, comes the first fully authoritative... Read more

The Ultimate Battle

By: Bill Sloan

Narrated by: Robertson Dean

Length: 14 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Respected historian Bill Sloan tells the full story of the Battle of Okinawa as it has never been told before, through the eyes of the men in battle.Using the same grunt’s-eye-view narrative style of Sloan’s acclaimed Brotherhood of Heroes, The Ultimate Battle is the full story of the largest land-sea-air battle ever waged by the United States,... Read more

Marco Polo - Abridged

By: Laurence Bergreen

Narrated by: Paul Boehmer

Length: 9 hours 48 minutes

Abridged: Yes

As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, comes the first fully authoritative... Read more

Leading Ladies - Abridged

By: Kay Bailey Hutchison

Narrated by: Kay Bailey Hutchison

Length: 6 hours 10 minutes

Abridged: Yes

In a series of skillfully drawn biographical portraits, United States Senator and bestselling author Kay Bailey Hutchison examines the lives of sixty-three pioneers in military service, journalism, public health, social reform, science, and politics—all American women. Mixing historical portraits with modern success stories, Senator Hutchison... Read more

Lion in the White House

By: Aida D. Donald

Narrated by: Pam Ward

Length: 8 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

New York state assemblyman, assistant secretary of the Navy, New York City police commissioner, governor of New York, vice president, and, at forty-two, the youngest president ever, Theodore Roosevelt—in his own words—"rose like a rocket." He was also a cowboy, a soldier, a historian, an intrepid explorer, and an unsurpassed environmentalist—all... Read more

Fair Game - Abridged

By: Valerie Plame Wilson

Narrated by: Valerie Plame Wilson

Length: 6 hours 50 minutes

Abridged: Yes

On July 6, 2003, four months after the United States invaded Iraq, former ambassador Joseph Wilson's now historic op-ed, "What I Didn't Find in Africa," appeared in The New York Times. A week later, conservative pundit Robert Novak revealed in his newspaper column that Ambassador Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame Wilson, was a CIA operative. The... Read more

The Rest Is Noise

By: Alex Ross

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 23 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

The scandal over modern music has not died down. While modern paintings by Picasso and Pollock sell for a hundred million or more, shocking musical works from Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring onward still send ripples of unease through audiences; yet the influence of modern sound can be felt everywhere. Alex Ross, music critic for the New Yorker,... Read more

Young Stalin

By: Simon Sebag Montefiore

Narrated by: James Adams

Length: 16 hours 26 minutes

Abridged: No

Young Stalin tells the story of an exceptional, charismatic, darkly turbulent young man born into obscurity, fancying himself a poet and a priest, and finally embracing revolutionary idealism as his Messianic mission in life. Equal parts scholar and terrorist, a mastermind of bank robberies, extortion, piracy, and murder, he was so impressive in... Read more

Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends

By: William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, Edward "Babe" Hef...

Narrated by: Dick Hill

Length: 10 hours 27 minutes

Abridged: No

Tom Hanks introduces the rousing story of two inseparable friends and soldiers portrayed in the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers.



William "Wild Bill" Guarnere and Edward "Babe" Heffron were among the first paratroopers of the U.S. Army—members of an elite unit of the 101st Airborne Division called Easy Company. Arguably the bravest, most... Read more

Schulz and Peanuts - Abridged

By: David Michaelis

Narrated by: Holter Graham

Length: 12 hours 43 minutes

Abridged: Yes

Charles M. Schulz, the most widely syndicated and beloved cartoonist of all time, is also one of the least understood figures in American culture. Now acclaimed biographer David Michaelis gives us an in-depth biography of the brilliant, unseen man behind Peanuts.It is the most American of stories: How a barber's son grew up from modest... Read more

Curveball - Abridged

By: Bob Drogin

Narrated by: Erik Singer

Length: 6 hours 15 minutes

Abridged: Yes

“A crucial study in the political manipulation of intelligence, understanding how Curveball got us into Iraq will arm us for the next round of lies coming out of Washington.”—Robert Baer, author of See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism

Curveball answers the crucial question of the Iraq war: How and why was... Read more

The Slave Ship

By: Marcus Rediker

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 13 hours 7 minutes

Abridged: No

For more than three centuries, slave ships carried millions of people from the coasts of Africa across the Atlantic to the New World. Much is known of the slave trade and the American plantation complex, but little of the ships that made it all possible. In The Slave Ship, award-winning historian Marcus Rediker draws on thirty years of research... Read more

The Jesuit and the Skull

By: Amir D. Aczel

Narrated by: Barrett Whitener

Length: 8 hours 2 minutes

Abridged: No

In December 1929, in a cave near Peking, a group of anthropologists and archaeologists that included a young French Jesuit priest named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin uncovered a prehuman skull. The find quickly became known around the world as Peking Man and was acclaimed as the missing link between erect hunting apes and our Cro-Magnon ancestors.... Read more

Inside the Red Mansion

By: Oliver August

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 10 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Due to a mix-up, Oliver August stumbles onto the hunt for China's most wanted man, Lai Changxing, an illiterate tycoon on the run from corruption charges. Sensing something emblematic in this outsized tale of rise and fall, August sets out to find the self-made billionaire, in the hope that if he can understand how Lai reinvented himself, he... Read more

Report from Ground Zero - Abridged

By: Dennis Smith

Narrated by: Beth McDonald, Eric Conger, Don Leslie, Ensembl...

Length: 6 hours 56 minutes

Abridged: Yes

What would make someone rush into a towering inferno and dash up stairs toward danger against a flow of human beings running in the opposite direction? Only someone who's been there can tell us. Read more