America Was NEVER Great

The Bluest Eye

By: Toni Morrison
Narrated by: Toni Morrison
Length: 7 hours 5 minutes

“Toni Morrison was a visionary. This, her first novel, was my first foray into her work, and I found it approachable, yet deep with meaning. It borrows its structure from a children’s Dick and Jane story, which Toni reads like a haunting incantation. Her narration of the entire book is flawless and stunning, like the text itself. The novel... Read more

The New Jim Crow

Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition

By: Michelle Alexander
Narrated by: Karen Chilton
Length: 16 hours 56 minutes

Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow.
Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been
adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of
the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the
winner of... Read more

A People's History of the United States

By: Howard Zinn
Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
Length: 34 hours 9 minutes

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

Frederick Douglass

Prophet of Freedom

By: David W. Blight
Narrated by: Prentice Onayemi
Length: 36 hours 56 minutes

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History**

“Extraordinary…a great American biography” (The New Yorker) of the most important African-American of the nineteenth century: Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became the greatest orator of his day and one of the leading abolitionists and writers of the era.

As a young man Frederick Douglass... Read more

Narrative of the Life Frederick Douglass

An American Slave

By: Frederick Douglas
Narrated by: Raymond Hearn
Length: 4 hours 12 minutes

This classic of American literature, a dramatic autobiography of the early life of an American slave, was first published in 1845, when its author had just achieved his freedom. It is a story that shocked the world with its first-hand account of the horrors of slavery. The book was an incredible success. It sold over thirty thousand copies and... Read more

Under the Feet of Jesus

By: Helena Maria Viramontes
Narrated by: Nancy Ticotin
Length: 4 hours 36 minutes

A moving and powerful novel about the lives of the men, women, and children who endure a second-class existence and labor under dangerous conditions as migrant workers in California’s fields.

“Viramontes depicts this world with sensuous physicality...working firmly in the social-realist vein of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Upton... Read more

Strangers from a Different Shore

A History of Asian Americans

By: Ronald Takaki
Narrated by: David Shih
Length: 24 hours 41 minutes

In an extraordinary blend of narrative history, personal recollection, and oral testimony, the author presents a sweeping history of Asian Americans. He writes of the Chinese who laid tracks for the transcontinental railroad, of plantation laborers in the cane fields of Hawaii, and of "picture brides" marrying strangers in the hope of becoming... Read more

At America's Gates

Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943

By: Erika Lee
Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
Length: 9 hours 32 minutes

With the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Chinese laborers became the first group in American history to be excluded from the United States on the basis of their race and class. This landmark law changed the course of U.S. immigration history, but we know little about its consequences for the Chinese in America or for the United States as a nation... Read more

No-No Boy

By: John Okada
Narrated by: David Shih
Length: 9 hours 46 minutes

First published in 1956, No-No Boy was virtually ignored by a public eager to put World War II and the Japanese internment behind them. It was not until the mid-1970s that a new generation of Japanese American writers and scholars recognized the novel's importance and popularized it as one of literature's most powerful testaments to the Asian... Read more

Farewell to Manzanar

By: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston
Narrated by: Jennifer Ikeda
Length: 5 hours

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

She Came to Slay

The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman

By: Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Narrated by: Robin Miles & Erica Armstrong Dunbar
Length: 3 hours 52 minutes

“"She Came to Slay" is a journey into a major historical figure that we all "know", but Erica Armstrong Dunbar gives us so much more. For the first time ever, Harriet Tubman, is a fully fleshed out person with a complicated past, tragic life events, and we get to see all of those things that fueled her passionate mission with the Underground... Read more

John Brown, Abolitionist

The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights

By: David S. Reynolds
Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
Length: 25 hours 13 minutes

Few historical figures are as intriguing as John Brown, the controversial Abolitionist who used terrorist tactics against slavery and single-handedly changed the course of American history. This brilliant biography of Brown (1800—1859) by the prize-winning critic and cultural biographer David S. Reynolds brings to life the Puritan warrior who... Read more

Master of the Mountain

Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves

By: Henry Wiencek
Narrated by: Brian Holsopple
Length: 11 hours 3 minutes

Is there anything new to say about Thomas Jefferson and slavery? The answer is a resounding yes. Henry Wiencek’s eloquent, persuasive book—based on new information coming from archaeological work at Monticello and on hitherto overlooked or disregarded evidence in Jefferson’s papers—opens up a huge, poorly understood dimension of Jefferson’s... Read more

Hiroshima

By: John Hersey
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 5 hours 23 minutes

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author John Hersey's seminal work of narrative nonfiction which has defined the way we think about nuclear warfare.  “One of the great classics of the war" (The New Republic) that tells what happened in Hiroshima during World War II through the memories of the survivors of the first atomic bomb... Read more

Hiroshima Diary

The Journal of a Japanese Physician, August 6-September 30, 1945

By: Michihiko Hachiya, MD
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
Length: 8 hours 52 minutes

The late Dr. Michihiko Hachiya was director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital when the world's first atomic bomb was dropped on the city. Though his responsibilities in the appalling chaos of a devastated city were awesome, he found time to record the story daily, with compassion and tenderness.

Dr. Hachiya's compelling diary was... Read more

There There

A novel

By: Tommy Orange
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Cuervo & Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 59 minutes

“A stunning debut novel by an original voice. Twelve characters of Native American descent, interrelated by birth or chance, struggle with the competing forces of cultural history and modern urban existence. Their stories build separately before colliding powerfully in the book’s final pages at The Big Oakland Powwow. I was riveted. Read more

The Fire Next Time

By: James Baldwin
Narrated by: Jesse Martin
Length: 2 hours 25 minutes

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The book that galvanized the nation, gave voice to the emerging civil rights movement in the 1960s—and still lights the way to understanding race in America today. - “The finest essay I’ve ever read.” —Ta-Nehisi CoatesAt once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin’s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the... Read more

Homegoing

A novel

By: Yaa Gyasi
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 13 hours 10 minutes

“AN EXCELLENT LISTEN. Read more

I Can't Breathe

A Killing on Bay Street

By: Matt Taibbi
Narrated by: Dominic Hoffman
Length: 12 hours 49 minutes

A work of riveting literary journalism that explores the roots and repercussions of the infamous killing of Eric Garner by the New York City police—from the bestselling author of The Divide

NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST

On July 17, 2014, a forty-three-year-old black man named Eric Garner died on a Staten... Read more

Kill Anything That Moves

By: Nick Turse
Narrated by: Don Lee
Length: 8 hours 49 minutes

Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were “isolated incidents” in the Vietnam War, carried out by a few “bad apples.” However, as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this pioneering investigation, violence against Vietnamese civilians was not at all exceptional. Rather,... Read more