In 2013, I first posted a list of some of my favorite history-related audiobooks. Here’s an updated list of 106 books, all available on Audible.com.
My selection principle has been pretty fluid. These are books I have enjoyed and learned from. Some of these books are published by university presses, some by trade presses. Some were written by self-identified historians, others by economists, journalists, or members of other professions. I’ve left off some books that work well on the page but not as well in the ear. Historians who like audiobooks may be especially interested by one item on this list: Matthew Rubery’s Untold Story of the Talking Book.
[The original post said 105 books, but I inadvertently left out Sheldon Stern’s Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory, which is great.]
14 January 2021: for books I’ve listened to between August 2019 and December 2020, see History Audiobooks, 2019-2020
| Title | Author | Length |
| 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created | Charles C. Mann | 17h 46m |
| 1861: The Civil War Awakening | Adam Goodheart | 18h 50m |
| Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, Vol. 1 | David Hackett Fischer | 29h 40m |
| All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw | Theodore Rosengarten | 23h 17m |
| American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer | Kai Bird, Martin J. Sherwin | 26h 30m |
| At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance – A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power | Danielle L. McGuire | 10h 52m |
| Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World | Joshua B. Freeman | 13h 43m |
| Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act, The | Clay Risen | 12h 49m |
| Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo, The | Tom Reiss | 13h 30m |
| Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy | Heather Ann Thompson | 22h 46m |
| Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin | Timothy Snyder | 18h 15m |
| Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin | Jill Lepore | 11h 36m |
| Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet | John G. Turner | 19h 36m |
| Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America | Kathleen Belew | 10h 35m |
| Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, The | Betty Medsger | 25h 32m |
| But Where is the Lamb?: Imagining the Story of Abraham and Isaac | James Goodman | 9h 35m |
| Capital in the Twenty-First Century | Thomas Piketty, Arthur Goldhammer (translator) | 24h 58m |
| Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, The | Carlo Ginzburg, Anne C. Tedeschi – translator, John Tedeschi – translator | 7h 57m |
| Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism | Bartow J. Elmore | 11h 22m |
| Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution | Simon Schama | 36h 48m |
| City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York | Tyler Anbinder | 24h 37m |
| Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies | Alan Taylor | 20h 36m |
| Comanche Empire, The | Pekka Hamalainen | 19h 51m |
| Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths Versus Reality, The | Sheldon Stern | 7h 40m |
| Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence | Bryan Burrough | 22h 13m |
| Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics, The | Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith | 11h 45m |
| Embracing Defeat | John W. Dower | 21h 38m |
| Empire of Cotton: A Global History | Sven Beckert | 20h 15m |
| Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution | Priya Satia | 17h 53m |
| Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People | Elizabeth A. Fenn | 10h 32m |
| Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time | Ira Katznelson | 22h 35m |
| Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq | Thomas E. Ricks | 10h 15m |
| Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, The | Joanne B. Freeman | 11h 19m |
| Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, The | Eric Foner | 18h 7m |
| Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City | Greg Grandin | 15h 25m |
| Free State of Jones: Mississippi’s Longest Civil War, The | Victoria E. Bynum | 7h 47m |
| Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science | Alice Dreger | 10h 39m |
| Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad | Eric Foner | 9h 3m |
| Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea | Mitchell Duneier | 10h 8m |
| Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right | Jennifer Burns | 13h 36m |
| Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America, The | Marc Levinson | 11h 39m |
| Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants out of America, The | Daniel Okrent | 14h |
| Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, The | Edward E. Baptist | 19h 47m |
| Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin | Hampton Sides | 15h 9m |
| Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, The | Annette Gordon-Reed | 30h 36m |
| Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race | Margot Lee Shetterly | 10h 47m |
| History of White People, The | Nell Irvin Painter | 14h 9m |
| How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States | Daniel Immerwahr | 17h 25m |
| Hunt for Vulcan: …And How Albert Einstein Destroyed a Planet, Discovered Relativity, and Deciphered the Universe, The | Thomas Levenson | 5h 49m |
| Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero, The | Timothy Egan | 14h 9m |
| Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, The | Alan Taylor | 15h 27m |
| Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy | Eri Hotta | 13h 16m |
| Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling | Richard Lyman Bushman | 28h 52m |
| Kingdom of Matthias: A Story of Sex and Salvation in 19th-Century America , The | Paul E. Johnson, Sean Wilentz | 7h 6m |
| Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East | Scott Anderson | 23h 45m |
| Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World | Maya Jasanoff | 16h 10m |
| Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness | Joshua Wolf Shenk | 11h 40m |
| Lucky Ones: One Family and the Extraordinary Invention of Chinese America, The | Mae M. Ngai | 8h 58m |
| Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention | Manning Marable | 22h 4m |
| Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South | Keri Leigh Merritt | 17h 32m |
| Mellon: An American Life | David Cannadine | 35h 57m |
| Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming | Erik M. Conway, Naomi Oreskes | 13h 9m |
| My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel | Ari Shavit | 20h 45m |
| New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, The | Michelle Alexander | 13h 16m |
| Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America | Rick Perlstein | 36h 46m |
| Not a Good Day to Die: The Untold Story of Operation Anaconda | Sean Naylor | 19h 36m |
| One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America | Kevin M. Kruse | 12h 58m |
| Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland | Christopher R. Browning | 8h 57m |
| Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line | Martha A. Sandweiss | 14h 12m |
| Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, A | Donald Worster | 19h 10m |
| Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon | Bronwen Dickey | 11h 52m |
| Polio: An American Story | David M. Oshinsky | 14h 37m |
| Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 | Tony Judt | 43h 1m |
| Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder | Caroline Fraser | 21h 26m |
| Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing: History of Computing | Marie Hicks | 11h |
| Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, The | Alan Brinkley | 21h 21m |
| Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory | David W. Blight | 20h 27m |
| Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, The | Gene Roberts, Hank Klibanoff | 21h 32m |
| Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women, The | Kate Moore | 15h 52m |
| Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788 | Pauline Maier | 23h 5m |
| Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America | Joshua Specht | 9h 28m |
| Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency | David Greenberg | 22h 15m |
| Revolution Down on the Farm: The Transformation of American Agriculture since 1929, A | Paul K. Conkin | 11h 7m |
| Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America, The | Timothy Snyder | 10h 10m |
| Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, from Eisenhower to the Tea Party | Geoffrey Kabaservice | 21h 12m |
| Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962, A | Alistair Horne | 29h 56m |
| Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition, The | Linda Gordon | 7h 43m |
| Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left, The | Landon R. Y. Storrs | 13h 47m |
| Second World War, The | Antony Beevor | 39h 18m |
| Shakespeare Riots: Revenge, Drama, and Death in Nineteenth-Century America, The | Nigel Cliff | 10h 51m |
| Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 | Adam Hochschild | 15h 26m |
| Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Mexican Millionaire, The | Karl Jacoby | 9h 29m |
| Street Without Joy: The French Debacle in Indochina | Bernard B. Fall | 13h 10m |
| Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise, The | Michael Grunwald | 16h 21m |
| Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary | Louis Hyman | 14h 17m |
| Tesla: Inventor of the Electrical Age | W. Bernard Carlson | 16h 11m |
| These Truths: A History of the United States | Jill Lepore | 29h |
| This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War | Drew Gilpin Faust | 10h 54m |
| Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation | Dan Fagin | 18h 31m |
| Untold Story of the Talking Book, The | Matthew Rubery | 11h 31m |
| Vaccine Race: Science, Politics, and the Human Costs of Defeating Disease, The | Meredith Wadman | 19h 13m |
| Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future, The | W. Patrick McCray | 11h 4m |
| Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, The | Isabel Wilkerson | 22h 40m |
| Washington’s Crossing | David Hackett Fischer | 18h 9m |
| Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, A | Amy S. Greenberg | 12h 46m |
| Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre | Heather Cox Richardson | 14h 33m |
