World Audiobooks | History

Church Crawling: The Lost Lives and Hidden Stories of England’s Churches

Audiobook

"A sweeping, riveting history of the Venetian Ghetto, the world's first Jewish ghetto. In the early sixteenth century, amidst the ruins of war, and in an atmosphere of religious hatred, the world's first Jewish 'ghetto' was established in Venice. Constrained in cramped, often insanitary conditions, the Jews who were forced to live there were extorted, abused and subjected to countless humiliating restrictions. Before long, Venice's Ghetto became the prototype for ghettos throughout Europe, paving the way for a more vicious and enduring form of antisemitism. Yet the Ghetto's story is also a testament of hope. Despite all they faced through the centuries, its residents thrived, creating a flourishing literary, musical and religious community. They sustained Venice's economy - and, as more migrants arrived, the Ghetto became a microcosm of the Jewish world. Alexander Lee traces this vivid story from the first Jewish arrivals in the early fourteenth century to the present day, reconstructing the Ghetto through the eyes of its inhabitants - from the domestic squabbles of a sixteenth-century rabbi to the agonising wait of a family bound for Auschwitz. Authoritative, detailed and incomparably intimate, this definitive history offers a fitting monument to the Ghetto's past - and powerful lessons for the future."

Alexander Lee (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Herlands: Lessons From Societies Where Women Make the Rules

"Brought to you by Penguin. A landmark exploration of women-led communities worldwide and what they can teach us about new ways to live, think and govern, from BBC global correspondent Megha Mohan. Society isn’t working for women - or any of us. But what if the rules were different? Imagine a world in which women have all the power. A world in which they work together to shape their rules, their societies and their futures. In reality, all-women communities have always existed, and continue to thrive all over the world. In this vital and ground-breaking book, Megha Mohan goes in search of their roots, discovering a vibrant global history, brought together here for the first time. She also takes us into today's women-led spaces, where women live on their own terms, showing us how we can rethink society for new ways of living, working and collaborating, often with less of a profit-driven mindset and a deeper connection to ancestry and nature. Through extensive research and exclusive first-hand reporting, and inspired by her great-grandmother’s own matrilineal community in South India, Mohan introduces us to fascinating and diverse groups of women. From the controversial feminist online trolls of South Korea, to millionaire leadership meetups on a private island in the Baltic sea, an ancient secret women’s language used in China, elder women co-housing in Paris and North London, the Rain Queens of South Africa, and villages for divorced or widowed women in Egypt and survivors of domestic abuse in Kenya, this is a truly global look at women's community. Essential reading for anyone interested in our collective histories, cultures, economics and governance, Herlands shows the power and possibility of new ways of living - and leading - for us all. 'A powerful and necessary reminder that women’s leadership is not an exception; it is tradition, it is history, and it is the future' Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, Prime Minister of Samoa 'With lyrical precision and journalistic integrity, Megha Mohan weaves a tapestry of resilience, leadership and radical hope' Sulaima Ishaq, head of Sudan’s Combating Violence Against Women and Children Commission 'Immersive and absorbing' Bhavana Menon, award-winning actress, who inspired India's Women in Cinema Collective © Megha Mohan 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Megha Mohan (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

A True Color: The Strange and Spectacular History of Defining Color--from Azure to Zinc Pink

"A kaleidoscopic journey through the secret history of hues-and the story of the obsessive genius behind the definitions of colors we use today, from the beloved author of Word by Word begonia (n.): 3 -s : a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see coral 3b), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet william - called also gaiety What could "bluer than fiesta" possibly mean? While editing dictionaries for Merriam-Webster, Kory Stamper found herself drawn again and again to the whimsical color definitions in Webster's Third New International Dictionary-especially when compared to the dry and impersonal entries that filled the rest of the dictionary. Stamper couldn't help but wonder: Who was the voice behind these peculiar definitions? Meet I. H. Godlove, an erratic but brilliant up-and-coming scientist who was one of the experts Merriam-Webster hired in 1930 to help them revise the dictionary to reflect a rapidly modernizing world. His fascinating life mirrors the wild and winding journey that color science, color psychology, and color production took through the twentieth century. Stamper tracks these industries as they move into the atomic age and intertwine in strange and surprising ways, spanning two world wars and involving chemical explosions, an unexpected suicide, dramatic office politics, and an extraordinary love story. Filled with captivating facts about color words and colors themselves-did you know that the word "puke" used to be a highly fashionable color before it was associated with vomit?-and fueled by Stamper's inexhaustible curiosity, True Color will transform the way you see the world, from black-and-white to Technicolor."

Kory Stamper (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

No One’s Coming: The Rogue Heroes Our Government Turns to When There's Nowhere Else to Turn

"From the award-winning author of American Sirens and A Thousand Naked Strangers comes a real-life thriller about the most daring rescue in air-medical history. As contagions spring up around the world, this story of outbreaks and the people who fight them resonates more than ever. JULY 2014. Two American medical volunteers who joined the fight against the deadliest Ebola outbreak in world history have gotten infected. The virus kills in just over a week and they're trapped in a hot zone with the clock ticking. If there's going to be a rescue it has to happen now. The very notion of getting the patients out is a radical and dangerous idea. Bringing them home might cause an outbreak of Ebola here in the US. No one's certain if it can or should be done or if they'll even survive the flight. In fact, the only thing anyone can agree on is that there's just one group of people resourceful enough (or crazy enough) to pull this off. Thousands of miles away and deep in the north Georgia mountains, a phone rings at Phoenix Air. US government calling with another impossible mission. Kevin Hazzard chronicles the ten frantic days that followed that phone call, dropping readers into the center of a first-of-its-kind international rescue. Phoenix Air, an eccentric band of engineers, pilots, and doctors with a reputation for doing things nobody else could, would become a lifeline to the world. Terrifying, fascinating, and inspiring, No One's Coming is a story of selfless heroes on both sides of the Atlantic who overcome the apathy and resistance of their own governments and communities, risking their lives to save others-once again proving that ordinary people are capable of overcoming the most extraordinary of problems."

Kevin Hazzard (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Europe: A New History

"Brought to you by Penguin. A new history of the idea of Europe from Ancient Greece to the present This wise, thoughtful and entertaining book draws on a lifetime of knowledge to tell the story as crisply as possible of the European continent and its people. Beginning in the Ancient World and ending with the war in Ukraine, Europe: A New History is both the story of the whole land mass and of the shifting points when a particular country or region has become dominant or extraordinary. The book is both a reliable and thoughtful guide to what has happened to this small western outcrop of the Asian landmass and a meditation on what is and what is not Europe, how this has changed but also the strange continuities. Europe: A New History is above all extraordinarily useful – Roderick Beaton is as good at writing about the great social, economic and climatic changes across the continent as on those small individual moments where suddenly history takes a new and sometimes drastic course. © Roderick Beaton 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Roderick Beaton (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Mafia: A Global History

"Everybody knows they exist: the Cosa Nostra, the Medellin Cartel, New York's Five Families, China's tongs. This book asks the question: how have mafias helped define the modern world? While the narrative begins deep in the past, the bulk of the story takes place after 1800. It is during the following two hundred years that the political, economic and social forces most relevant to the development of mafias took shape. The critical chapters centre upon the decades between the end of the First World War and the close of the twentieth century. In these years we see the rise of those figures most synonymous with the idea of the mafia: Capone, Escobar, Du, Lansky, Mogilevich, El Chapo and the Krays to name a few. To understand these characters, and the gangs they led, Mafia will take readers on intimate tours of the locales that birthed their notoriety: Chicago, Sinaloa, Istanbul, Shanghai or the East End. In the spirit of Simon Sebag Montefiore's recent treatment of great families, or Sven Beckert's history of cotton, Mafia: A Global History explains how these organizations shape, as well as reflect, the construction of modern states, economies and societies that form our increasingly integrated world."

Ryan Gingeras (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World

"The page-turning story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work, and journalism. Emily “Mickey” Hahn, Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn. The lively salons of Shanghai, Yugoslavia on the brink of World War II, the shot-marked streets of the Spanish Civil War, Hong Kong under Japanese occupation, Germany and Italy at war, post-Blitz London, McCarthy-era Mexico, Congo, the American South, Cuba, and beyond. These women didn’t just bear witness to the great changes of the twentieth century, they didn’t just create the stories that gave the backstory to wars and roused their readers to support, they transformed the world they were writing about even as they transformed the way it was written about and read. Hahn, West, and Gellhorn each traversed the globe in search of great stories they would then dispatch to outlets like The New Yorker, The Times (London), The New York Times, The New Republic, The Atlantic Monthly, Collier’s, and Vogue. They often traveled alone, sometimes teaming up with other women reporters, sometimes with their husbands in tow. They sneaked onto the front lines when they were forbidden, talked to everyday civilians to get color and detail for their stories. They wrote novels to pay the bills(!) and articles to explain the world to itself. They became mothers and friends, took joy in each other’s successes. They changed the world and journalism. Julia Cooke's Restless Women is the story of three women whose curiosity, grit, and ambition hugely expanded the possibilities for women and meaningful work."

Julia Cooke (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Traversal

"From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. In Traversal, her startling and moving new book, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: What makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses? Popova illuminates our various instruments of reckoning with these questions—our telescopes and our treatises, our postulates and our poems—through the intertwined lives, loves, and legacies of visionaries both celebrated and sidelined by history, people born into the margins of their time and place who lived to write the future: Mary Shelley, Walt Whitman, Frederick Douglass, Fanny Wright, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, Marie Tharp, Alfred Wagener, Humphry Davy, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead. Woven throughout their stories are other threads—the world's first global scientific collaboration, the Irish potato famine, the decoding of the insulin molecule, the invention of the bicycle, how nature creates blue—to make the tapestry of meaning more elaborate yet more clarifying as the book advances, converging on the ultimate question of what makes life alive and worth living. By turns epic and intimate—as concerned with the physical laws binding atoms into molecules as with the psychic forces binding us to each other—Traversal explores the universe between cells and souls to reveal the world, and our lives, in a dazzling new light."

Maria Popova (Author), Natascha McElhone (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Face: A Cultural History

"Brought to you by Penguin. A pioneering study into how we interpret faces and what they reveal about us, from a world-renowned cultural historian What’s in a face? The face is one of our quintessential features and is the only part of the body where all the senses come together: smell, taste, sight, touch, hearing. Though your face might change over the course of your life – whether through ageing, accident, illness or lifestyle – it remains a foundational marker of your identity. In The Face, cultural historian Fay Bound Alberti explores the ways humans have interpreted faces and correlated their features with ideas of morality, social hierarchy, psychology and so much more, revealing some of the cultural biases that inform the interactions of our everyday lives. Bound Alberti charts how new technologies that reflect or alter our face’s appearance have transformed our conception of selfhood over time – from the growth of portraiture in the Renaissance and the mass production of mirrors and photography in the nineteenth century, to twenty-first century innovations, such as digital avatars and face transplants. Bringing together a wealth of fascinating research, interviews and illuminating personal narratives, Bound Alberti probes beneath the surface to ask what our faces really say about us. © Fay Bound Alberti 2026 (P) Penguin Audio 2026"

Fay Bound Alberti (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Transgender History

"Covering American transgender history from the mid-twentieth century to today, Transgender History takes a chronological approach to the subject of transgender history, with each chapter covering major movements, writings, and events. Chapters cover the transsexual and transvestite communities in the years following World War II; trans radicalism and social change, which spanned from 1966 with the publication of The Transsexual Phenomenon, and lasted through the early 1970s; the mid-'70s to 1990-the era of identity politics and the changes witnessed in trans circles through these years; and the gender issues witnessed through the '90s and '00s. Transgender History includes informative sidebars highlighting quotes from major texts and speeches in transgender history and brief biographies of key players, plus excerpts from transgender memoirs and discussion of treatments of transgenderism in popular culture."

Susan Stryker (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

Our Diaries, Ourselves: How Diarists Chronicle Their Lives and Document Our World

"A love letter to the art of the diary and to the people who write-and read-them Featuring iconic diary keepers like Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Taylor Swift We know what it was like to be an out lesbian in 19th-century England, what the inner world of a young girl in hiding looks like, and what the earliest internet users' favorite websites were, in part, because of diaries. Our Diaries, Ourselves is a joyful deep dive into this time-honored tradition of preserving who we are. From Marie Curie to Taylor Swift, this book illustrates how keeping a diary helps us to understand ourselves and our world. Tour Italy's "City of the Diary," Pieve Santo Stefano, which boasts a diary archive, museum, and annual festival. Discover how women have used diaries for centuries as canvases for self-expression and self-care and as tools of resistance in a patriarchal society. Travel through time and across cultures, from renowned figures to ordinary people, for glimpses of their lives-different yet comfortingly familiar. Our Diaries, Ourselves is a treasure trove of social history, feminist rebellion, and personal reflection. This book celebrates the vibrant and varied ways we live our lives and the stories we choose to tell about them. And it reminds us of a uniquely human need that transcends time, language, and technology: to see and be seen, remember and be remembered."

Betsy Rubiner (Author), TBD (Narrator)

Audiobook

World Audiobooks in History