In 2025, I listened to 54 audiobooks that covered history, broadly defined. Some of these I had skimmed earlier, but this was my first time reading them straight through. This list mainly serves to let people know what’s out there, rather than what’s good, but some standouts this year include The Occasional Human Sacrifice, Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse, 1967, Buckley, and Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical.

Among university presses, Princeton still seems to do the best job producing audio versions, but Yale is catching up.

Beinart, Peter. Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning. Random House, 2025.

Bellamy, Dr Wes. Monumental: It Was Never About A Statue. BlackGold Publishing, 2018.

Benton, Lauren. They Called It Peace: Worlds of Imperial Violence. Princeton University Press, 2024.

Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Yale University Press, 2023.

Blitzer, Jonathan. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis. Penguin Press, 2024.

Bosch, Torie. “You Are Not Expected to Understand This”: How 26 Lines of Code Changed the World. Princeton University Press, 2022.

Boyle, Kevin. The Shattering: America in the 1960s. W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Burns, Jennifer. Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023.

Canaday, Margot. The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton University Press, 2009.

Catte, Elizabeth. Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia. Arcadia Publishing, 2024.

Conn, Steven. The Lies of the Land: Seeing Rural America for What It Is—and Isn’t. University of Chicago Press, 2023.

Continetti, Matthew. The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. Basic Books, 2022.

Dunkelman, Marc J. Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back. PublicAffairs, 2025.

Dunlavy, Colleen A. Small, Medium, Large: How Government Made the U.S. into a Manufacturing Powerhouse. Polity, 2024.

Edwards, Sebastian. The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. Princeton University Press, 2025.

Elliott, Carl. The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

Engel, Jeffrey, ed. Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Eustace, Nicole. Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America. Liveright, 2021.

Geroulanos, Stefanos. The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins. Liveright Publishing, 2024.

Goodman, Adam. The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Expelling Immigrants. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Grunwald, Michael. We Are Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System and Save Our Climate. Simon and Schuster, 2025.

Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd. Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of the Modern South. ‎ W. W. Norton & Company, 2019.

Hasen, Richard L. Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy. Yale University Press, 2020.

Heefner, Gretchen. The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. The New Press, 2018.

Huntington, John S. Far-Right Vanguard: The Radical Roots of Modern Conservatism. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Jacobsen, Annie. Nuclear War: A Scenario. Penguin, 2024.

Joseph, Peniel E. Freedom Season: How 1963 Transformed America’s Civil Rights Revolution. Basic Books, 2025.

Keller, Renata. The Fate of the Americas: The Cuban Missile Crisis and the Hemispheric Cold War. UNC Press Books, 2025.

Kierner, Cynthia A. The Tory’s Wife: A Woman and Her Family in Revolutionary America. University of Virginia Press, 2023.

Madhavan, Guru. Applied Minds: How Engineers Think. W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

Mailer, Norman. Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery. Random House, 1995.

Mitman, Gregg. Empire of Rubber: Firestone’s Scramble for Land and Power in Liberia. The New Press, 2021.

Morris, Errol. The Ashtray. University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Neuman, William. Things Are Never So Bad That They Can’t Get Worse: Inside the Collapse of Venezuela. St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2022.

Rauchway, Eric. The Money Makers: How Roosevelt and Keynes Ended the Depression, Defeated Fascism, and Secured a Prosperous Peace. Basic Books, 2015.

Segev, Tom. 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year That Transformed the Middle East. Macmillan, 2007.

Sfard, Michael. The Wall and the Gate: Israel, Palestine, and the Legal Battle for Human Rights. Macmillan + ORM, 2018.

Shapiro, Laurie Gwen. The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage That Made an American Icon. Penguin, 2025.

Sharman, J. C. Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order. Princeton University Press, 2020.

Siddique, Asheesh Kapur. The Archive of Empire: Knowledge, Conquest, and the Making of the Early Modern British World. Yale University Press, 2024.

Sinha, Manisha. The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860-1920. Liveright Publishing, 2024.

Slobodian, Quinn. Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right. Princeton University Press, 2025.

Stanley, Jason. Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Simon and Schuster, 2024.

Tamkin, Emily. Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities. Hurst Publishers, 2022.

Tanenhaus, Sam. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America. Random House, 2025.

Taubman, William, and Philip Taubman. McNamara at War: A New History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2025.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. UNC Press Books, 2019.

Tejani, James. A Machine to Move Ocean and Earth: The Making of the Port of Los Angeles and America. W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

Valenze, Deborah. The Invention of Scarcity: Malthus and the Margins of History. Yale University Press, 2023.

Wagner, Kim A. Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History. PublicAffairs, 2024.

Whitlock, Craig. Fat Leonard: How One Man Bribed, Bilked, and Seduced the U.S. Navy. Simon and Schuster, 2024.

Winer, Laurie. Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical. Yale University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300269123.

Wynn-Williams, Sarah. Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism. Flatiron Books, 2025.