North America Audiobooks | History

Blood: Stories of Life and Death from the Civil War

The Civil War, the most dramatic moment in this nation's history, also produced some of our greatest literature. From tragic charges, to prison escapes, to the desolation wrought on those who stayed behind, Blood is an extraordinary collection of reminiscences, fiction, and excerpts from diaries and letters.

Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Walt Whitman (Author), Various, Various Readers (Narrator)

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With My Face to the Enemy: A Civil War Anthology

With My Face to the Enemy is a collection of powerful, insightful essays about the Civil War by some of the most renowned historians in their field. Essayists include: Stephen W. Sears on Stonewall Jackson's last march; James M. McPherson on failed Southern strategies; Joseph T. Glattharr on Ulysses S. Grant at Vicksburg; and Noah Andre Trudeau on the Fort Pillow massacre. Each of these absorbing pieces has appeared in print only once before: in the pages of the award-winning, authoritative MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. In each issue, MHQ brings the history of warfare and of society to life through vivid narrative accounts of the key events-some well known, some seemingly obscure-that have shaped the world we live in today. Perhaps because it was fought on American soil, pitting brother against brother, friend against friend, freedom against slavery, and states' rights against the principle of union, the Civil War remains a powerful presence in the American imagination. For this reason, With My Face to the Enemy will find a large and appreciative audience, eager to hear what our era's most distinguished historical thinkers and writers have to say about a conflict that still echoes in our hearts and minds to this day.

Robert Cowley (Author), Eric Conger (Narrator)

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Prince of Tennesee: Rise of Al Gore

In The Prince of Tennessee, David Maraniss and Ellen Nakashima explore in rich detail the forces that have shaped Al Gore's life, and the ways that his past offers clues to what kind of president he would be. Now including exclusive original commentary on the unprecedented post-election period and Gore's concession. Gore's path to power, at first glance, seems straight and narrow. While Bill Clinton's rise is a story of obstacles overcome, Gore's ascendance seems the opposite: the son of political aristocracy reared by loving and demanding parents who groomed him as a princeling to reach the top. But his life was shaped by as much duality as Clinton's. As a child Gore was shuffled back and forth from political Washington to rural Tennessee, his ancestral homeland. The contrast reflects a larger tension between what others expected of Gore and what he wanted to do. Here was the quintessential good son whom his classmates teased as the wooden Apollo. He would occasionally try to rebel but inevitably be yanked back by the burden of expectations and his own insecurity. His first ambition was to be a novelist, but his friends at Harvard saw him as a royal figure for whom a political career was unavoidable. He opposed the war in Vietnam, yet enlisted in the army anyway, out of an obligation to shield his father, the antiwar senator. When he eventually turned to politics Gore brought with him competing impulses: the cautious political moderate with an occasional tendency toward uncommon boldness, the awkward public figure who in private can be a raucous storyteller, the loyal son and vice president who wants to be considered on his own terms, and the reluctant politician who burned with a desire to fulfill his parents' dream and become president.

David Maraniss (Author), David Maraniss (Narrator)

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Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation

A sixth-generation North Carolinian, highly-acclaimed author John Ehle grew up on former Cherokee hunting grounds. His experience as an accomplished novelist, combined with his extensive, meticulous research, culminates in this moving tragedy rich with historical detail. The Cherokee are a proud, ancient civilization. For hundreds of years they believed themselves to be the "Principle People" residing at the center of the earth. But by the 18th century some of their leaders believed it was necessary to adapt to European ways in order to survive. Those chiefs sealed the fate of their tribes in 1875 when they signed a treaty relinquishing their land east of the Mississippi in return for promises of wealth and better land. The U.S. government used the treaty to justify the eviction of the Cherokee nation in an exodus that the Cherokee will forever remember as the "trail where they cried." John McDonough narrates with thoughtful gravity. The heroism and nobility of the Cherokee shine through this intricate story of American politics, ambition, and greed.

John Ehle (Author), John McDonough (Narrator)

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Jazz

The companion volume to the ten-part PBS TV series by the team responsible forThe Civil War and Baseball.Continuing in the tradition of their critically acclaimed works, Geoffrey C. Ward and Ken Burns vividly bring to life the story of the quintessential American music jazz. Born in the black community of turn-of-the-century New Orleans but played from the beginning by musicians of every color, jazz celebrates all Americans at their best.Here are the stories of the extraordinary men and women who made the music: Louis Armstrong, the fatherless waif whose unrivaled genius helped turn jazz into a soloist's art and influenced every singer, every instrumentalist who came after him; Duke Ellington, the pampered son of middle-class parents who turned a whole orchestra into his personal instrument, wrote nearly two thousand pieces for it, and captured more of American life than any other composer. Bix Beiderbecke, the doomed cornet prodigy who showed white musicians that they too could make an important contribution to the music; Benny Goodman, the immigrants' son who learned the clarinet to help feed his family, but who grew up to teach a whole country how to dance; Billie Holiday, whose distinctive style routinely transformed mediocre music into great art; Charlie Parker, who helped lead a musical revolution, only to destroy himself at thirty-four; and Miles Davis, whose search for fresh ways to sound made him the most influential jazz musician of his generation, and then led him to abandon jazz altogether. Buddy Bolden, Jelly Roll Morton, Dizzy Gillespie, Art Tatum, Count Basie, Dave Brubeck, Artie Shaw, and Ella Fitzgerald are all here; so are Sidney Bechet, Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and a host of others.But Jazz is more than mere biography. The history of the music echoes the history of twentieth-century America. Jazz provided the background for the giddy era that F. Scott Fitzgerald called the Jazz Age. The irresistible pulse of big-band swing lifted the spirits and boosted American morale during the Great Depression and World War II. The virtuosic, demanding style called bebop mirrored the stepped-up pace and dislocation that came with peace. During the Cold War era, jazz served as a propaganda weapon and forged links with the burgeoning counterculture. The story of jazz encompasses the story of American courtship and show business; the epic growth of great cities New Orleans and Chicago, Kansas City and New York and the struggle for civil rights and simple justice that continues into the new millennium.Visually stunning, with more than five hundred photographs, some never before published, this book, like the music it chronicles, is an exploration and a celebration of the American experiment.From the Hardcover edition.

Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns (Author), LeVar Burton (Narrator)

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Nothing Like It In The World: The Men Who Built The Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869

In this account of an unprecedented feat of engineering, vision, and courage, Stephen E. Ambrose offers a historical successor to his universally acclaimed Undaunted Courage, which recounted the explorations of the West by Lewis and Clark. Nothing Like It in the World is the story of the men who built the transcontinental railroad -- the investors who risked their businesses and money; the enlightened politicians who understood its importance; the engineers and surveyors who risked, and lost, their lives; and the Irish and Chinese immigrants, the defeated Confederate soldiers, and the other laborers who did the backbreaking and dangerous work on the tracks. The Union had won the Civil War and slavery had been abolished, but Abraham Lincoln, who was an early and constant champion of railroads, would not live to see the great achievement. In Ambrose's hands, this enterprise, with its huge expenditure of brainpower, muscle, and sweat, comes to life. The U.S. government pitted two companies -- the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific Railroads -- against each other in a race for funding, encouraging speed over caution. Locomo-tives, rails, and spikes were shipped from the East through Panama or around South America to the West or lugged across the country to the Plains. This was the last great building project to be done mostly by hand: excavating dirt, cutting through ridges, filling gorges, blasting tunnels through mountains. At its peak, the workforce -- primarily Chinese on the Central Pacific, Irish on the Union Pacific -- approached the size of Civil War armies, with as many as fifteen thousand workers on each line. The Union Pacific was led by Thomas ""Doc"" Durant, Oakes Ames, and Oliver Ames, with Grenville Dodge -- America's greatest railroad builder -- as chief engineer. The Central Pacific was led by California's "Big Four": Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins. The surveyors, the men who picked the route, were latter-day Lewis and Clark types who led the way through the wilderness, living off buffalo, deer, elk, and antelope. In building a railroad, there is only one decisive spot -- the end of the track. Nothing like this great work had been seen in the world when the last spike, a golden one, was driven in at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, as the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific tracks were joined. Ambrose writes with power and eloquence about the brave men -- the famous and the unheralded, ordinary men doing the extraordinary -- who accomplished the spectacular feat that made the continent into a nation.

Stephen E. Ambrose (Author), Jeffrey DeMunn (Narrator)

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Seabiscuit: An American Ledgend

Laura Hillenbrand, author of the runaway phenomenon Unbroken, brilliantly re-creates a universal underdog story in this #1 New York Times bestseller.Seabiscuit was one of the most electrifying and popular attractions in sports history and the single biggest newsmaker in the world in 1938, receiving more coverage than FDR, Hitler, or Mussolini. But his success was a surprise to the racing establishment, which had written off the crooked-legged racehorse with the sad tail. Three men changed Seabiscuit's fortunes: Charles Howard was a onetime bicycle repairman who introduced the automobile to the western United States and became an overnight millionaire. When he needed a trainer for his new racehorses, he hired Tom Smith, a mysterious mustang breaker from the Colorado plains. Smith urged Howard to buy Seabiscuit for a bargain-basement price, then hired as his jockey Red Pollard, a failed boxer who was blind in one eye, half-crippled, and prone to quoting passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson. Over four years, these unlikely partners survived a phenomenal run of bad fortune, conspiracy, and severe injury to transform Seabiscuit from a neurotic, pathologically indolent also-ran into an American sports icon.From the Hardcover edition.

Laura Hillenbrand (Author), Campbell Scott (Narrator)

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The Great Republic

The Great Republic is Sir Winston Churchill’s personal vision of American history, from the arrival of the first European settlers to the dawn of the Cold War, edited by his grandson, the historian and journalist Winston S. Churchill. The book is a magnificent retelling of the American story, including some of the best short histories of the Revolutionary War and the Civil War ever written. The bulk of this book, America’s history up to the twentieth century, has until now been found only within Churchill’s much longer four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1953. The chapters on America from that larger work have been knit together into a whole, and to them Winston S. Churchill has added essays and speeches of his grandfather’s, many never before published in book form, to bring the book up to the mid-twentieth century. Sir Winston Churchill’s renown as a statesman has tended to overshadow his great gifts as a historian. History was the work of his heart’s delight, and few subjects were dearer to him than America. His mother, Jennie Jerome, was American, and all of his life Churchill harbored a deep warmth of feeling for this country and a sense of its special destiny. With fondness, he called America "the Great Republic," and in his later years he trained all of his powers on the history this book contains. The Great Republic is stirring in its sweep and breathtaking in the flash and vigor of its insights. Only an author with Sir Winston Churchill’s special perspective on America, his experience as a leader and strategist, his intimacy with the responsibilities of guiding a nation, and his great gifts as a narrative historian could have written a book that lays out America’s history, character, and destiny with this book’s special brilliance. Statesman and historian Sir Winston Churchill led Great Britain through the Second World War as prime minister. He was the author of forty-two books, including the six-volume history The Second World War, which was chosen by the National Review as the nonfiction "book of the century."

Winston S. Churchill (Author), Winston S. Churchill (Narrator)

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Confederates in the Attic

When prize-winning war correspondent Tony Horwitz leaves the battlefields of Bosnia and the Middle East for a peaceful corner of the Blue Ridge Mountains, he thinks he's put war zones behind him. But awakened one morning by the crackle of musket fire, Horwitz starts filing front-line dispatches again this time from a war close to home, and to his own heart. Propelled by his boyhood passion for the Civil War, Horwitz embarks on a search for places and people still held in thrall by America's greatest conflict. The result is an adventure into the soul of the unvanquished South, where the ghosts of the Lost Cause are resurrected through ritual and remembrance. In Virginia, Horwitz joins a band of 'hardcore' reenactors who crash-diet to achieve the hollow-eyed look of starved Confederates; in Kentucky, he witnesses Klan rallies and calls for race war sparked by the killing of a white man who brandishes a rebel flag; at Andersonville, he finds that the prison's commander, executed as a war criminal, is now exalted as a martyr and hero; and in the book's climax, Horwitz takes a marathon trek from Antietam to Gettysburg to Appomattox in the company of Robert Lee Hodge, an eccentric pilgrim who dubs their odyssey the 'Civil Wargasm.' Written with Horwitz's signature blend of humor, history, and hard-nosed journalism, Confederates in the Attic brings alive old battlefields and new ones 'classrooms, courts, country bars' where the past and the present collide, often in explosive ways. Poignant and picaresque, haunting and hilarious, it speaks to anyone who has ever felt drawn to the mythic South and to the dark romance of the Civil War.

Tony Horwitz (Author), Michael Beck (Narrator)

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Don't Know Much About the Civil War

Millions of Americans, bored by dull textbooks, are in the dark about the most significant event in our history. Now New York Times bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis comes to the rescue, deftly sorting out the players, the politics, and the key events—Emancipation and Reconstruction, Shiloh and Gettysburg, Generals Grant and Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe—and much more. Drawing on moving eyewitness accounts, Davis includes a wealth of “hidden history” about the roles played by women and African Americans before and during the war, along with lesser-known facts that will enthrall even learned Civil War buffs. Vivid, informative, and hugely entertaining, Don’t Know Much About the Civil War is the only audiobook you’ll ever need on “the war that never ended.”

Kenneth C. Davis (Author), Kenneth C. Davis, Various Narrators (Narrator)

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Rosa Parks

In 1955, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress, had no idea she was changing history when, fed up and tired, she refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a bus in segregated Alabama. Today, she is immortalized for the defiance that sent her to jail and triggered a bus boycott that catapulted Martin Luther King, Jr. into the national spotlight. Who was she, before and after her historic act, and how did that act sound the death knell for Jim Crow? Historian Douglas Brinkley brings mid-20th century America alive in this brilliant examination of a celebrated heroine in the context of her life and tumultuous times. Here is the quiet dignity, hope, courage, and humor that have made this every-woman a living legend.

Douglas Brinkley (Author), Karen White (Narrator)

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Dwight D. Eisenhower speeches

A collection of speeches given by Dwight D. Eisenhower. Speeches included are: 101st Airborne Division Citation Ceremony ca 1945 Address before Special Session of United Nations - Aug. 13, 1958 Address on Need for Effective Labor Bill - Aug. 6, 1959 Address on the Far East Situation -Sept. 11, 1958 Address on the Middle East Situation, July 15, 1958 Address to the Nation on Events in Paris, May 25, 1960 Address to the United Nations, Sept 22, 1960 Developments in the Middle East, Oct 31, 1956 Eisenhower Library Groundbreaking - Oct. 13, 1959 Farewell Address, Jan 17, 1961 Guildhall Address, London, England, June 12, 1945 Little Rock Address - Sept 24, 1957 Order Of The Day, June 6, 1944 Radio Report to the Nation - Aug. 6, 1953 Remarks After The Unconditional Surrender Of Arms of Italy Reviewing the State Of The Union Message, Jan. 5, 1956 Satellite SCORE Goodwill Message Security in the Free World - March 16, 1959 State Of The Union Address, Jan. 7, 1960 pt.1 State Of The Union Address, Jan. 7. 1960 pt. 2 State Of The Union Address, Jan. 1, 1954 pt.1 State Of The Union Address, Jan 1, 1954 pt. 2 State Of The Union Address, Jan 6, 1955 pt. 1 State Of The Union Address, Jan 6, 1955 pt. 2 The Chance Of Peace Victory In Europe Day Statement, May 8, 1945

Dwight D. Eisenhower (Author), Dwight D. Eishenhower (Narrator)

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North America Audiobooks in History