History audiobooks, 2021 edition

In 2021, I listened to forty-one audiobooks that covered history, broadly defined. Some of these I had skimmed earlier, but this was my first time reading them straight through. While trade presses still dominate the audio realm, it’s great to see an increasing number of university presses releasing titles.

Publication details come from Google Books. Please let me know if you spot any errors, such as the date of the paperback in place of the original publication date.

Edit, January 5, 2022. Here are links to previous lists:

A History Professor’s Guide to Audible.com, 2013.

A History Professor’s Guide to Audible.com, 2019 edition

History Audiobooks, 2019-2020

  1. Appelbaum, Binyamin. The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society. Little, Brown, 2019.
  2. Baldwin, Davarian L. In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities. PublicAffairs, 2021.
  3. Bevins, Vincent. The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World. PublicAffairs, 2020.
  4. Bolger, Daniel P. Why We Lost: A General’s Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
  5. Brown, Kate. Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
  6. Buccola, Nicholas. The Fire Is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America. Princeton University Press, 2020.
  7. Campbell, Tracy. The Year of Peril: America in 1942. Yale University Press, 2020.
  8. Chang, Gordon H. Ghosts of Gold Mountain: The Epic Story of the Chinese Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019.
  9. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. 1994. Audiobook is based on the Basic Books edition, 2019.
  10. Cohen, Lizabeth. Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
  11. Delgado, Richard, and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. NYU Press, 2012.
  12. Demuth, Bathsheba. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
  13. Farmer, Jared. Trees in Paradise: A California History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013.
  14. Gabriele, Matthew, and David M. Perry. The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe. HarperCollins, 2021.
  15. Grinspan, Jon. The Age of Acrimony: How Americans Fought to Fix Their Democracy, 1865-1915. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2021.
  16. Harrington, Anne. Mind Fixers: Psychiatry’s Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness. W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.
  17. Hinton, Elizabeth. From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America. Harvard University Press, 2016.
  18. Holmes, Richard. Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.
  19. Johnson, Walter. The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. Basic Books, 2020.
  20. Keefe, Patrick Radden. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.
  21. Levin, Josh. The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth. Little, Brown, 2019.
  22. Levinson, Marc. The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger. Princeton University Press, 2008.
  23. Manion, Jen. Female Husbands: A Trans History. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
  24. Matzko, Paul. The Radio Right: How a Band of Broadcasters Took on the Federal Government and Built the Modern Conservative Movement. Oxford University Press, 2020.
  25. Mez, Kristin Kobes Du. Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. Liveright Publishing, 2020.
  26. Mishra, Pankaj. From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals Who Remade Asia. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012.
  27. Moore, Wes, and Erica L. Green. Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. Random House Publishing Group, 2021.
  28. Ohler, Norman. Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
  29. Olmsted, Kathryn S. Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11. Oxford University Press, USA, 2011.
  30. Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred. Bold Type Books, 2021.
  31. Schrag, Philip G., Andrew I. Schoenholtz, and Jaya Ramji-Nogales. The End of Asylum. Georgetown University Press, 2021.
  32. Sherwin, Martin J. Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020.
  33. Stewart, Katherine. The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism. Bloomsbury USA, 2020.
  34. Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vintage Books, 2010.
  35. Tooze, Adam. The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931. Penguin Publishing Group, 2015.
  36. Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. Oxford University Press, 2019.
  37. Vinsel, Lee, and Andrew L. Russell. The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most. Currency, 2020.
  38. Wellerstein, Alex. Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. University of Chicago Press, 2021.
  39. Wertheim, Stephen. Tomorrow, the World. Harvard University Press, 2020.
  40. Whitlock, Craig, and The Washington Post. The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War. Simon and Schuster, 2021.
  41. Zucchino, David. Wilmington’s Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy. Grove Atlantic, 2021.