History audiobooks

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...

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

In this all new collection of conversations, Noam Chomsky explores the most immediate and urgent concerns: Iran's challenge to the United States, the deterioration of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the ongoing occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, the rise of China, and the growing power of the left in Latin America, as well as the Democratic...

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 »

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,...

Who Was First?

By: Russell Freedman
Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
Length: 1 hours 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 »

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 »

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...

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 »

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...

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 Intellectual Devotional: American History

By: David S. Kidder & Noah D. Oppenheim
Narrated by: Jeff Woodman & Helen Litchfield
Length: 18 hours 39 minutes
Abridged: No

Modeled after those bedside books of prayer and contemplation that millions turn to for daily spiritual guidance and growth, the national bestseller The Intellectual Devotional—offering secular wisdom and cerebral nourishment—drew a year's worth of readings from seven different fields of knowledge. In this follow-up volume, authors David S....

Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends

By: William "Wild Bill" Guarnere, Edward "Babe" Heffron & Robyn Post
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 »

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...

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...

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 »

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 »

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 »

Report from Ground Zero - Abridged

By: Dennis Smith
Narrated by: Ensemble Cast, Eric Conger, Jeff David, Don Leslie & Beth McDonald
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 »

Blackwater

By: Jeremy Scahill
Narrated by: Tom Weiner
Length: 14 hours 32 minutes
Abridged: No

On September 16, 2007, machine gun fire erupted in Baghdad’s Nisour Square, leaving seventeen Iraqi civilians dead, among them women and children. The shooting spree, labeled “Baghdad’s Bloody Sunday,” was neither the work of Iraqi insurgents nor US soldiers. The shooters were private forces working for a mercenary company: Blackwater USA, the...

Arsenals of Folly

By: Richard Rhodes
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 14 hours 11 minutes
Abridged: No

From the Pulitzer Prize—winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb: the story of the entire postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade when the United States and the Soviet Union came within scant hours of nuclear war–and then nearly agreed to abolish nuclear weapons.

In a narrative that moves like a... Read more »

Blue Skies, No Fences - Abridged

By: Lynne Cheney
Narrated by: Lynne Cheney
Length: 5 hours 38 minutes
Abridged: Yes

In Blue Skies, No Fences: A Memoir of Childhood and Family, Lynne Cheney re-creates the years after World War II in a small town on the high plains of the West. Portraying an era that started with the Ink Spots on the Zenith Radio in her family's living room and ended with Elvis on the jukebox at the local canteen, she tells of coming of age in... Read more »

The Forgotten 500

By: Gregory A. Freeman
Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
Length: 10 hours 40 minutes
Abridged: No

The astonishing, never-before-told story of the greatest rescue mission of World War II—when the OSS set out to recover more than 500 airmen trapped behind enemy lines...

During a bombing campaign, hundreds of American airmen were shot down in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia. Local Serbian villagers risked their own lives to give refuge to the... Read more »