History audiobooks

The Faithful Executioner: Life and Death, Honor and Shame in the Turbulent Sixteenth Century

By: Joel F. Harrington

Narrated by: Jame Gillies

Length: 9 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

Based on the rare and until now overlooked journal of a Renaissance-era executioner, the noted historian Joel F. Harrington's The Faithful Executioner takes us deep inside the alien world and thinking of Meister Frantz Schmidt of Nuremberg, who, during forty-five years as a professional executioner, personally put to death 394 individuals and... Read more

Crusaders

By: Dan Jones

Narrated by: Dan Jones

Length: 16 hours 6 minutes

Abridged: No

A major new history of the Crusades with an unprecedented wide scope, told in a tableau of portraits of people on all sides of the wars, from the author of Powers and Thrones.

For more than one thousand years, Christians and Muslims lived side by side, sometimes at peace and sometimes at war. When Christian armies seized Jerusalem in 1099, they... Read more

The Making of Asian America

By: Erika Lee

Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller

Length: 15 hours 51 minutes

Abridged: No

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

Trespassers at the Golden Gate

By: Gary Krist

Narrated by: Rob Shapiro

Length: 11 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

The sensational, forgotten true story of a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco and the trial that epitomized the city's transformation from raucous frontier town into modern metropolis—from the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Sin

Shortly before dusk on November 3, 1870, just as the ferryboat El Capitan... Read more

The Founding Myth

By: Andrew L. Seidel

Narrated by: Christopher Grove

Length: 12 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

Do "In God We Trust," the Declaration of Independence, and other historical "evidence" prove that America was founded on Judeo-Christian principles? Are the Ten Commandments the basis for American law? A constitutional attorney dives into the debate about religion's role in America's founding.



In today's contentious political climate,... Read more

Work Won't Love You Back

By: Sarah Jaffe

Narrated by: Sarah Jaffe

Length: 12 hours 59 minutes

Abridged: No

A deeply-reported examination of why "doing what you love" is a recipe for exploitation, creating a new tyranny of work in which we cheerily acquiesce to doing jobs that take over our lives.

You're told that if you "do what you love, you'll never work a day in your life." Whether it's working for "exposure" and "experience," or enduring poor... Read more

American Scary

By: Jeremy Dauber

Narrated by: Jeremy Dauber

Length: 16 hours 54 minutes

Abridged: No

From the acclaimed author of American Comics and Jewish Comedy comes a highly entertaining book that examines the American obsession with horror—and what it tells us about ourselves.
 
In American Scary, noted cultural historian and Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber takes the reader to the startling origins of the horror genre in the United... Read more

At War with Ourselves

By: H. R. McMaster

Narrated by: H. R. McMaster

Length: 12 hours 42 minutes

Abridged: No

A revealing account of National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster’s turbulent and consequential thirteen months in the Trump White House.At War with Ourselves is the story of helping a disruptive President drive necessary shifts in U.S. foreign policy at a critical moment in history. McMaster entered an administration beset by conflict and the... Read more

Medical Bondage

By: Deirdre Cooper Owens

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 5 hours 39 minutes

Abridged: No

The accomplishments of pioneering doctors such as John Peter Mettauer, James Marion Sims, and Nathan Bozeman are well documented. It is also no secret that these nineteenth-century gynecologists performed experimental caesarean sections, ovariotomies, and obstetric fistula repairs primarily on poor and powerless women. Medical Bondage breaks new... Read more

Area 51

By: Annie Jacobsen

Narrated by: Annie Jacobsen

Length: 16 hours 11 minutes

Abridged: No

This "compellingly hard-hitting" bestseller from a Pulitzer Prize finalist gives readers the complete untold story of the top-secret military base for the first time (New York Times). 

It is the most famous military installation in the world. And it doesn't exist. Located a mere seventy-five miles outside of Las Vegas in Nevada's desert, the base... Read more

Gulag

By: Anne Applebaum

Narrated by: Laural Merlington

Length: 27 hours 41 minutes

Abridged: No

The Gulag—a vast array of Soviet concentration camps that held millions of political and criminal prisoners—was a system of repression and punishment that terrorized the entire society, embodying the worst tendencies of Soviet communism. In this magisterial and acclaimed history, Anne Applebaum offers the first fully documented portrait of the... Read more

Lenin's Tomb

By: David Remnick

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 29 hours 4 minutes

Abridged: No

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
One of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times 

From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism.... Read more

America for Americans

By: Erika Lee

Length: 13 hours 36 minutes

Abridged: No

This definitive history of American xenophobia is "essential reading for anyone who wants to build a more inclusive society" (Ibram X. Kendi, New York Times-bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist)

The United States is known as a nation of immigrants. But it is also a nation of xenophobia. In America for Americans, Erika Lee shows that an... Read more

Ignition!

By: John Drury Clark

Narrated by: Jonathan Todd Ross

Length: 9 hours 19 minutes

Abridged: No

Ignition! is the inside story of the Cold War era search for a rocket propellant which could be trusted to take man into space. A favorite of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, listeners will want to tune into this "really good book on rocket[s]," available for the first time in audio.

Ignition! is the story of the search for a rocket propellant... Read more

The Afghanistan Papers

By: Craig Whitlock & The Washington Post

Narrated by: Dan Bittner

Length: 9 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

A Washington Post Best Book of 2021

The #1 New York Times bestselling investigative story of how three successive presidents and their military commanders deceived the public year after year about America’s longest war, foreshadowing the Taliban’s recapture of Afghanistan, by Washington Post reporter and three-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Craig... Read more

Epidemics and Society

By: Frank M. Snowden

Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin

Length: 23 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

A "brilliant and sobering" (Paul Kennedy, Wall Street Journal) look at the history and human costs of pandemic outbreaks



As seen on 60 Minutes



The World Economic Forum #1 book to read for context on the coronavirus outbreak



This sweeping exploration of the impact of epidemic diseases looks at how mass infectious outbreaks have shaped society, from... Read more

Disunited Nations

By: Peter Zeihan

Narrated by: Peter Zeihan & Roy Worley

Length: 16 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

Should we stop caring about fading regional powers like China, Russia, Germany, and Iran? Will the collapse of international cooperation push France, Turkey, Japan, and Saudi Arabia to the top of international concerns?
Most countries and companies are not prepared for the world Peter Zeihan says we’re already living in. For decades, America’s... Read more

Cobalt Red

By: Siddharth Kara

Narrated by: Peter Ganim

Length: 11 hours 20 minutes

Abridged: No

This program includes an author's note read by the author.

An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo’s cobalt mining operation—and the moral implications that affect us all.

Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the... Read more

Farewell to Manzanar

By: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston

Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda

Length: 5 hours

Abridged: No

The powerful true story of life in a Japanese American internment camp.During World War II the community called Manzanar was hastily created in the high mountain desert country of California, east of the Sierras. Its purpose was to house thousands of Japanese American internees. One of the first families to arrive was the Wakatsukis, who were... Read more

Heart of Europe

By: Peter H. Wilson

Narrated by: Napoleon Ryan

Length: 34 hours 3 minutes

Abridged: No

The Holy Roman Empire lasted a thousand years, far longer than ancient Rome. Yet this formidable dominion never inspired the awe of its predecessor. Voltaire quipped that it was neither holy, Roman, nor an empire. Yet as Peter H. Wilson shows, the Holy Roman Empire tells a millennial story of Europe better than the histories of individual... Read more

The Dictionary People

By: Sarah Ogilvie

Narrated by: Joan Walker & Sarah Ogilvie

Length: 11 hours 8 minutes

Abridged: No

A WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION FINALIST • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A history and celebration of the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word.

“Enthralling and exuberant, Sarah Ogilvie tells the surprising story of the making of the OED.... Read more

Lawrence in Arabia

By: Scott Anderson

Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner

Length: 23 hours 45 minutes

Abridged: No

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
New York Times • Christian Science Monitor • NPR • Seattle Times • St. Louis Dispatch

National Book Critics Circle Finalist -- American Library Association Notable Book

A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history – the Arab Revolt and the... Read more

Path Between the Seas

By: David McCullough

Narrated by: Nelson Runger

Length: 31 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

The National Book Award–winning epic chronicle of the creation of the Panama Canal, a first-rate drama of the bold and brilliant engineering feat that was filled with both tragedy and triumph, told by master historian David McCullough.

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Truman, here is the national bestselling epic chronicle of the... Read more

The Teacher Wars

By: Dana Goldstein

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

Length: 11 hours 34 minutes

Abridged: No

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A groundbreaking history of 175 years of American education that brings the lessons of the past to bear on the dilemmas we face today—and brilliantly illuminates the path forward for public schools.

“[A] lively account." —New York Times Book Review

In The Teacher Wars, a rich, lively, and unprecedented history of... Read more