History audiobooks

The Family Roe

By: Joshua Prager
Narrated by: Elisabeth Rodgers
Length: 18 hours 40 minutes
Abridged: No

A masterpiece of reporting on the Supreme Court's most divisive case, Roe v. Wade, and the unknown lives at its heart. Despite her famous pseudonym, “Jane Roe,” no one knows the truth about Norma McCorvey (1947–2017), whose unwanted pregnancy in 1969 opened a great fracture in American life. Journalist Joshua Prager spent hundreds of hours with... Read more »

The Story of Jane

By: Laura Kaplan
Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
Length: 10 hours 31 minutes
Abridged: No

First published in 1997, The Story of Jane recounts the evolution of Jane, the underground group in Chicago that performed abortion services before the procedure was legalized. An extraordinary history by one of its members, this is the first account of Jane's evolution, the conflicts within the group, and the impact its work had both on the...

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...

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

By: David Harvey
Narrated by: Clive Chafer
Length: 8 hours 41 minutes
Abridged: No

Neoliberalism—the doctrine that market exchange is an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide for all human action—has become dominant in both thought and practice throughout much of the world since 1970 or so. Writing for a wide audience, David Harvey, author of The New Imperialism and The Condition of Postmodernity, here tells the... Read more »

Women and Gender in Islam

By: Leila Ahmed
Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
Length: 14 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No

A classic, pioneering account of the lives of women in Islamic history, republished for a new generation.

This pioneering study of the social and political lives of Muslim women has shaped a whole generation of scholarship. In it, Leila Ahmed explores the historical roots of contemporary debates, ambitiously surveying Islamic discourse on women... Read more »

The Great Stewardess Rebellion

By: Nell McShane Wulfhart
Narrated by: Bonnie Friel
Length: 10 hours 6 minutes
Abridged: No

The empowering true story of a group of spirited stewardesses who “stood up to huge corporations and won, creating momentous change for all working women.” (Gloria Steinem, co-founder of Ms. magazine)

It was the Golden Age of Travel, and everyone wanted in. As flying boomed in the 1960s, women from across the United States applied for jobs as... Read more »

The Pentagon's Brain

By: Annie Jacobsen
Narrated by: Annie Jacobsen
Length: 18 hours 22 minutes
Abridged: No

Discover the definitive history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, in this Pulitzer Prize finalist from the author of the New York Times bestseller Area 51.
No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science R&D agency. In the first-ever... Read more »

Who Killed Jane Stanford?

By: Richard White
Narrated by: Christopher P. Brown
Length: 11 hours 27 minutes
Abridged: No

In 1885 Jane and Leland Stanford cofounded a university to honor their recently deceased young son. After her husband's death in 1893, Jane Stanford, a devoted spiritualist who expected the university to inculcate her values, steered Stanford into eccentricity and public controversy for more than a decade. In 1905 she was murdered in Hawaii, a... Read more »

The Nineties

By: Chuck Klosterman
Narrated by: Chuck Klosterman & Dion Graham
Length: 12 hours 38 minutes
Abridged: No

An instant New York Times bestseller!

From the bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong, a wise and funny reckoning with the decade that gave us slacker/grunge irony about the sin of trying too hard, during the greatest shift in human consciousness of any decade in American history.

It was long ago, but not as long as it seems: The Berlin... Read more »

Conspiracy of Fools

By: Kurt Eichenwald
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 30 hours 29 minutes
Abridged: No

From an award-winning New York Times reporter comes the full, mind-boggling true story of the lies, crimes, and ineptitude behind the Enron scandal that imperiled a presidency, destroyed a marketplace, and changed Washington and Wall Street forever.

It was the corporate collapse that appeared to come out of nowhere. In late 2001, the Enron... Read more »

Born to Be Hanged

By: Keith Thomson
Narrated by: Feodor Chin
Length: 9 hours 41 minutes
Abridged: No

Discover the “fascinating and outrageously readable” account of the roguish acts of the first pirates to raid the Pacific in a crusade that ended in a sensational trial back in England—perfect for readers of Nathaniel Philbrick and David McCullough (Douglas Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Lost City of the Monkey God​)

The Road to Unfreedom

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Timothy Snyder
Length: 10 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No

With the end of the Cold War, the victory of liberal democracy was thought to be absolute. Observers declared the end of history, confident in a peaceful, globalized future. But we now know this to be premature. Authoritarianism first returned in Russia, as Putin developed a political system dedicated solely to the consolidation and exercise of... Read more »

Debt - Updated and Expanded

By: David Graeber
Narrated by: Grover Gardner
Length: 17 hours 48 minutes
Abridged: No

Now in audio, the updated and expanded edition : David Graeber’s “fresh . . . fascinating . . . thought-provoking . . . and exceedingly timely” (Financial Times) history of debt Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom: he shows that before there was money, there was debt. For more than 5,000 years,... Read more »

Facing the Mountain

By: Daniel James Brown
Narrated by: Louis Ozawa
Length: 17 hours 39 minutes
Abridged: No

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
One of NPR's "Books We Love" of 2021
Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography 

Winner of the Christopher Award 
 
“Masterly. An epic story of four Japanese-American families and their sons who volunteered for military service and displayed uncommon heroism… Propulsive and gripping, in part because... Read more »

The Only Plane in the Sky

By: Garrett M. Graff
Narrated by: A Full 45-Person Cast
Length: 15 hours 54 minutes
Abridged: No

2020 AUDIOBOOK OF THE YEAR AUDIE AWARD WINNER!

2020 MULTI-VOICED PERFORMANCE AUDIE AWARD WINNER!

Audio bonus! The audio edition includes an exclusive interview with Garrett Graff and Holter Graham as well as archival audio from United States Presidential addresses, In-Flight Communications, and Air Traffic Control.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“This... Read more »

Ain't I a Woman

By: Bell Hooks
Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
Length: 8 hours 55 minutes
Abridged: No

A classic work of feminist scholarship, Ain't I a Woman has become a must–read for all those interested in the nature of black womanhood. Examining the impact of sexism on black women during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism among feminists, and the black woman's involvement with feminism, Hooks attempts to... Read more »

Capitalist Realism

By: Mark Fisher
Narrated by: Russell Brand
Length: 2 hours 48 minutes
Abridged: No

It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. 

Since the events of 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system — a situation that the banking crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. 

This book analyses the development and principal features of this... Read more »

How to Invent Everything

By: Ryan North
Narrated by: Ryan North
Length: 12 hours 55 minutes
Abridged: No

An NPR Best Book of 2018

"How to Invent Everything is such a cool book. It's essential reading for anyone who needs to duplicate an industrial civilization quickly." --Randall Munroe, xkcd creator and New York Times-bestselling author of What If?

The only book you need if you're going back in time

What would you do if a time machine hurled you... Read more »

All That She Carried

By: Tiya Miles
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 9 hours 29 minutes
Abridged: No

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A renowned historian traces the life of a single object handed down through three generations of Black women to craft a “deeply layered and insightful” (The Washington Post) testament to people who are left out of the archives.
 
WINNER: PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book... Read more »

Bloodlands

By: Timothy Snyder
Narrated by: Ralph Cosham
Length: 19 hours 14 minutes
Abridged: No

From the author of the international bestseller On Tyranny, the definitive history of Hitler’s and Stalin’s politics of mass killing, explaining why Ukraine has been at the center of Western history for the last century.

Americans call the Second World War "The Good War."But before it even began, America's wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed... Read more »

The Will to Change

By: bell hooks
Narrated by: Janina Edwards
Length: 6 hours 5 minutes
Abridged: No

Everyone needs to love and be loved—even men. But to know love, men must be able to look at the ways that patriarchal culture keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving.

In The Will to Change, bell hooks gets to the heart of the matter and shows men how to express the emotions that are a fundamental... Read more »

People Love Dead Jews

By: Dara Horn
Narrated by: Xe Sands
Length: 6 hours 23 minutes
Abridged: No

A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to appease the living. Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture—and increasingly in response to a recent... Read more »

A People's History of the United States

By: Howard Zinn
Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
Length: 34 hours 9 minutes
Abridged: No

THE CLASSIC NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"A wonderful, splendid book—a book that should be read by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." –Howard Fast

Historian Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States chronicles American history from the bottom up, throwing...

These Truths

By: Jill Lepore
Narrated by: Jill Lepore
Length: 28 hours 59 minutes
Abridged: No

In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades, award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the origins and rise of a divided nation. The American experiment rests on three ideas?"these truths," Jefferson called them?political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people. And it rests, too,... Read more »