History audiobooks

Lincoln

By: David Herbert Donald

Narrated by: Dick Estell

Length: 30 hours 21 minutes

Abridged: No

A masterful work by Pulitzer Prize–winning author David Herbert Donald, Lincoln is a stunning portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s life and presidency.

Donald brilliantly depicts Lincoln’s gradual ascent from humble beginnings in rural Kentucky to the ever-expanding political circles in Illinois, and finally to the presidency of a country divided by... Read more

D-Day

By: Stephen E. Ambrose

Narrated by: Jesse Boggs

Length: 25 hours 16 minutes

Abridged: No

Stephen E. Ambrose’s D-Day is the definitive history of World War II’s most pivotal battle, a day that changed the course of history.

D-Day is the epic story of men at the most demanding moment of their lives, when the horrors, complexities, and triumphs of life are laid bare. Distinguished historian Stephen E. Ambrose portrays the faces of... Read more

Europe - The Art Of Austerity

By: Michael Goldfarb

Narrated by: Full Cast & Michael Goldfarb

Length: 43 minutes

Abridged: No

Michael Goldfarb looks back to the Europe of the 1930s and asks how artists, writers and film-makers responded to the poverty, mass unemployment and poltical instability of the Great Depression. Through the work of Bertolt Brecht, George Orwell, Jean Renoir and others, Michael charts the devastating impact of the slump as economic crisis... Read more

Last Train to Memphis

By: Peter Guralnick

Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell

Length: 22 hours 32 minutes

Abridged: No

Written with grace, humor, and affection, Last Train to Memphis has been hailed as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. It is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis' humanity in a way that has yet to be duplicated.
A New York Times Notable BookWinner of the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award
"Elvis steps from the pages. You can... Read more

Black Fire

By: Robert Graysmith

Narrated by: Robert Graysmith

Length: 11 hours 58 minutes

Abridged: No

When twenty-eight-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved ninety lives at sea), he had... Read more

The Liberator

By: Alex Kershaw

Narrated by: Fred Sanders

Length: 11 hours 1 minute

Abridged: No

The true story of the bloodiest and most dramatic march to victory of the Second World War: the battlefield odyssey of a maverick U.S. Army officer and his infantry unit as they fought for over five hundred days to liberate Europe - from the invasion of Italy to the gates of Dachau.

   From July 10, 1943, the date of the Allied landing in Sicily,... Read more

The Generals

By: Thomas E. Ricks

Narrated by: William Hughes

Length: 15 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Fiasco and The Gamble comes an epic history of the decline of American military leadership from World War II to Iraq.History has been kinder to the American generals of World War II—Marshall, Eisenhower, Patton, and Bradley—than to the generals of the wars that followed. Is this merely nostalgia?... Read more

Iron Curtain

By: Anne Applebaum

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Length: 26 hours 44 minutes

Abridged: No

In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and... Read more

The Revenge of Geography

By: Robert D. Kaplan

Narrated by: Michael Prichard

Length: 13 hours 24 minutes

Abridged: No

In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world's hot spots by examining their... Read more

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

By: Alison Weir

Narrated by: Simon Prebble

Length: 22 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

This acclaimed best-seller from popular historian Alison Weir is a fascinating look at the Tudor family dynasty and its most infamous ruler. The Six Wives of Henry VIII brings to life England's oft-married monarch and the six wildly different but equally fascinating women who married him. Gripping from the first sentence to the last and loaded... Read more

Raiders

By: Ross Kemp

Narrated by: Mark Meadows

Length: 7 hours 46 minutes

Abridged: No

Six raids that changed the course of history.

Operation Judgement: one of the most spectacular efforts of World War Two, where obsolete British biplanes attacked the Italian fleet in Taranto.

Operation Archery: the first true combined operation carried out by all three British forces. THis successful raid persuaded Hitler that the Allies were... Read more

This Living Hand

By: Edmund Morris

Narrated by: Edmund Morris

Length: 19 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

When the multitalented biographer Edmund Morris (who writes with equal virtuosity about Theodore Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Beethoven, and Thomas Edison) was a schoolboy in colonial Kenya, one of his teachers told him, “You have the most precious gift of all—originality.” That quality is abundantly evident in this selection of essays. They cover... Read more

Hanoi’s War

By: Lien-Hang T. Nguyen

Narrated by: Hillary Huber

Length: 15 hours 12 minutes

Abridged: No

While most historians of the Vietnam War focus on the origins of US involvement and the Americanization of the conflict, Lien-Hang T. Nguyen examines the international context in which North Vietnamese leaders pursued the war and American intervention ended. This riveting narrative takes the listener from the marshy Mekong Delta swamps to the... Read more

Isaac's Army

By: Matthew Brzezinski

Narrated by: Arthur Morey

Length: 16 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

Starting as early as 1939, disparate Jewish underground movements coalesced around the shared goal of liberating Poland from Nazi occupation. For the next six years, separately and in concert, they waged a heroic war of resistance against Hitler's war machine that culminated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Isaac's Army, Matthew Brzezinski... Read more

We Have the War Upon Us

By: William J. Cooper

Narrated by: Andrew Garman

Length: 12 hours 25 minutes

Abridged: No

Noted historian William J. Cooper has forged a reputation as one of today's foremost Civil War experts. In We Have the War Upon Us, Cooper takes a fresh look at the months between Lincoln's election and the attack on Fort Sumter that sparked the war. For years, compromise had kept the North and South from conflict- but in these crucial months,... Read more

My Old Man

By: John Major

Narrated by: Sir John Major & Roy Hudd OBE

Length: 13 hours 40 minutes

Abridged: No

Former prime minister John Major takes a remarkable journey into his own unconventional family past to tell the richly colourful story of the British music hall Music hall was one of the glories of Victorian England. Sentimental, vulgar, class-conscious, but always patriotic and on the side of the underdog, it held a mirror... Read more

Six Months in 1945

By: Michael Dobbs

Narrated by: Bob Walter

Length: 16 hours 35 minutes

Abridged: No

From the author of the best-selling One Minute to Midnight, a riveting account of the pivotal six-month period spanning the end of World War II, the dawn of the nuclear age, and the beginning of the Cold War.

When Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill met in Yalta in February 1945, Hitler’s armies were on the run and victory was imminent.  The Big... Read more

The Great Siege

By: Ernle Bradford

Narrated by: Simon Vance

Length: 7 hours 9 minutes

Abridged: No

Suleiman the Magnificent, sultan of the Ottoman Empire and the most powerful ruler in the world, was determined to conquer Europe. Only one thing stood in his way: a dot of an island in the Mediterranean called Malta, which was occupied by the Knights of Saint John, the cream of the warriors of the Holy Roman Empire. A clash of civilizations... Read more

Darwin

By: Paul Johnson

Narrated by: John Curless

Length: 4 hours 31 minutes

Abridged: No

The author of more than 40 books, acclaimed historian Paul Johnson also writes for Forbes and theSpectator. With Darwin, Johnson sheds new light on a man many regard as the most influential scientist in history. Darwin's theories of evolution transformed the world's view of biology. Here, in meticulous detail, Johnson describes Darwin's... Read more

There Was a Country

By: Chinua Achebe

Narrated by: Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

Length: 9 hours 22 minutes

Abridged: No

From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart comes a longawaited memoir about coming of age with a fragile new nation, then watching it torn asunder in a tragic civil war

The defining experience of Chinua Achebe’s life was the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970. The conflict was infamous for its savage impact on... Read more

The Old Ways

By: Robert Macfarlane

Narrated by: Robin Sachs

Length: 11 hours 23 minutes

Abridged: No

From the acclaimed author of The Wild Places comes an engrossing exploration of walking and thinking.In this exquisitely written book, Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge, England, home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove roads, and sea paths that crisscross both the British landscape and its waters and territories beyond.... Read more

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

By: Timothy Egan

Narrated by: David Drummond

Length: 11 hours 55 minutes

Abridged: No

At once an incredible adventure narrative and a penetrating biographical portrait, Egan's book tells the remarkable untold story behind Edward Curtis's iconic photographs, following him throughout Indian country from desert to rainforest as he struggled to document the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. Even with the backing of... Read more

Consider the Fork

By: Bee Wilson

Narrated by: Alison Larkin

Length: 11 hours 30 minutes

Abridged: No

Since prehistory, humans have braved the business ends of knives, scrapers, and mashers, all in the name of creating something delicious—or at least edible. In Consider the Fork, award-winning food writer and historian Bee Wilson traces the ancient lineage of our modern culinary tools, revealing the startling history of objects we often take for... Read more

Purpose and Persuasion

By: Ken Masugi

Narrated by: Ken Masugi

Length: 4 hours 13 minutes

Abridged: No

In this series of lectures, Professor Ken Masugi of Johns Hopkins University examines the importance of rhetoric in American politics. Political speeches have, since the nation's inception, defined and shaped American politics. Professor Masugi demonstrates how the greatest American political speeches take their bearings from the Declaration of... Read more