Listen to Popular Titles Audiobooks in History, 20th Century

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Title: The Nazi Death Machine

Subtitle: The Confession of Walter Schellenberg

Author: Walter Schellenberg

Narrator: Tim Dalgleish

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-03-17

Publisher: Grand Oak Rare Books Inc

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 3 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Hitler's former foreign intelligence official tells all in this dark confession, revealing his part in the crimes of World War II, and the corruption that ran rampant in Hitler's regime.

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Title: Broadway: The History and Legacy of New York City's Theater Center and Cultural Heart

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Scott Clem

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 16 mins

Language: English

Release date: 07-03-17

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Of all the great cities in the world, few personify their country like New York City. As America's largest city and best known immigration gateway into the country, NYC represents the beauty, diversity and sheer strength of the United States, a global financial center that has enticed people chasing the "American Dream" for centuries.

America's prototypical metropolis was once a serene landscape in which Native American tribes farmed and fished, but when European settlers arrived its location on the Eastern seaboard sparked a rapid transformation. Given its history of rapid change, it is ironic that the city's inhabitants often complain about the city's changing and yearn for things to stay the same. The website EV Grieve, whose name plays on the idea that the East Village "grieves" for the history and character the neighborhood loses every day to market forces and gentrification, regularly features a photo of some site, usually of little interest: an abandoned store, a small bodega, a vacant lot. The caption says, simply, that this is what the site looked like on a given day. The editors of the website are determined to document everything and anything for future generations.

That is hardly a modern phenomenon. New Yorkers have always grieved over the city's continuous upheavals and ever-increasing size and complexity. By the 1820s, Wall Street had lost whatever charm it might have had; former residents complained that two-story houses had given way to intimidating five-story office buildings. The New York Commercial Advertiser noted in 1825 that "Greenwich is no longer a country village," but rather an up-and-coming neighborhood. Today, it's hard to find a history of New York City that doesn't refer to Henry Jamess famous 1908 story The Jolly Corner, in which a man returns to New York after decades abroad only to be horrified by an unfamiliar hellscape of commercial growth. He finds his once-jolly childhood home nearly buried "among the dreadful multiplied numberings which seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledger-page, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and criss-crossed lines and figures." The once-beloved city has transformed itself into "the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success." That childhood homean 1830s townhousein fact belonged to the James family on Washington Square in Greenwich Village. It was destroyed to make way for New York University, which is today embroiled in yet another real estate saga as it plans to expand once again.

Broadway is more than just jazz hands, glittering costumes, tap numbers, and catchy show tunes that loop in one's mind for hours on end with the mildest provocation. Every year, thousands upon thousands of Broadway hopefuls climb on top of one another to hoist themselves onto the grand stage. Countless hours of training, coupled with blood, sweat, and tears, are poured into the craft, all for a chance to see their names emblazoned across the playbills and marquees not to mention, perform for potential millions. Behind the dazzling lights and razzle and dazzle of Manhattan's legendary theater district is an equally colorful and riveting history.

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Title: X-15 Diary

Subtitle: The Story of America's First Spaceship

Author: Richard Tregaskis

Narrator: Chris Sorensen

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 32 mins

Language: English

Release date: 06-13-17

Publisher: Dreamscape Media, LLC

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Built of titanium and a chrome-nickel alloy known as Inconel X, the X-15 was the fastest plane ever built, streaking through the lower reaches of outer space even before the first space capsules reached orbit. First tested in 1959, the X-15 proved to be a crucial testing ground for the astronauts and hardware in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and even the Space Shuttle programs. Celebrated reporter Richard Tregaskis spent time with the pilots, engineers, and other key personnel involved in the project. We learn of the years of planning and design, devastating onboard explosions, exhilarating triumphs, and, above all, the personal and professional sacrifices that paved the way for the enduring legacy of the blisteringly fast X-15 rocket plane.

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Title: Pearl Harbor Attacked

Subtitle: Every Known Surviving Radio Broadcast from Dec 7, 1941

Author: Jim Hodges - producer

Narrator: full cast

Format: Original Recording

Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-23-17

Publisher: Jim Hodges Productions

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

December 7, 1941 - a day that will live in infamy!

When the Japanese ambassador was visiting with our Secretary of State, he did not know what we already knew - that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had begun. On a quiet Sunday morning in sunny Honolulu, Hawaii, Japanese planes were dropping bombs on our fleet at anchor, our planes on the ground, and the town itself. Our entry into World War II had begun.

Listen live as the first reports of the attack come in, interrupting a football game broadcast. The live reports from the scene, the speculation and shock - these broadcasts play in order as they were broadcast throughout the day.

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Title: June 17, 1967

Subtitle: The Battle of Xom Bo II

Author: David J. Hearne

Narrator: Mark Sando

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-03-17

Publisher: Subterfuge Publishing

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

The true story of the battle of Xom Bo II that was fought on June 17, 1967. It was a battle that pitted 500 1st Infantry Division soldiers against 800 to 2000 Viet Cong from the 271st Regiment. The bloody clash took the lives of 39 Americans and seriously wounded 150 more. It is the minute-by-minute story of what happened that day in the steamy jungle and the story of the men who fought so valiantly to survive the ambush. It is the story of the loved ones left behind and the wounded who struggled to become whole again. It's a story that is the result of talking to many of the survivors of the battle and the wives, brothers, sisters, or friends of those who were there when over 8000 artillery rounds rained down around LZ X-Ray to dislodge the entrenched Viet Cong. June 17, 1967 is a story of war, men, and the loved ones. It is the story of the youth, culture, and happenings that made the battle of Xom Bo II such an enigma for the summer of love in 1967. It is an angry story and a healing story that will bring feelings to the surface and tear at your heart.

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Title: The Zoot Suit Riots

Subtitle: The History of the Racial Attacks in Los Angeles During World War II

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Kenneth Ray

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 19 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-26-17

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

"Marching through the streets of downtown Los Angeles, a mob of several thousand soldiers, sailors, and civilians, proceeded to beat up every zoot suiter they could find. Pushing its way into the important motion picture theaters, the mob ordered the management to turn on the house lights and then ran up and down the aisles dragging Mexicans out of their seats. Streetcars were halted while Mexicans, and some Filipinos and Negroes, were jerked from their seats, pushed into the streets and beaten with a sadistic frenzy." Carey McWilliams, journalist.

Even enemies will agree that the United States is a unique nation, in that its culture has been developed almost entirely by immigrantspeople who have come to the country from other places and carved their way into society. Sometimes called a melting pot, sometimes a tossed salad, the nation has been shaped by all that is good and bad of the people who live here. Sadly, history has taught that where there is immigration, there will always be conflict. Just as any newly married couple will argue over whose family to spend the holidays with, so those coming from different nations and cultures will clash over which traditions can be integrated into the new society and which ones must be left behind. One might think that after some 400 years of dealing with these issues, the nation would have mastered the subject, but instead the opposite seems true. In the early days of 2016, Americans were engaged in a heated presidential campaign fraught with rhetoric and fear over the role of immigrants in the United States. Candidates frequently spoke out against certain cultures, insisting they are dangerous to the American economy or even national security.

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Title: The 1936 North American Heat Wave

Subtitle: The History of America's Deadly Heat Wave During the Dust Bowl and Great Depression

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Jim D. Johnston

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 34 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-26-17

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

"People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk.... The nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions." (Avis D. Carlson)

While farmers were planting crops, the seeds were also being sown for a natural disaster once a severe drought hit the prairie land in the 1930s. Due to a lack of proper dryland farming methods, wind erosion and the drought combined to create horrific dust storms that devastated wide swathes of Great Plains and even reached cities on the East Coast like New York City and Washington, D.C. It's estimated that the dust storms affected about 100 million acres during the decade, uprooting not just soil but tens of thousands of people as their farms and families suffered.

With farms failing across vast portions of Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, those who could no longer support themselves became migrants, moving to other states like California, but the country was still in the throes of the Great Depression. As a result, there was a unique class of suffering that was documented in graphically realistic novels like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. At the height of the Dust Bowl came a heat wave in 1936, and ironically, the weather early that year did not exactly suggest that heat would be a problem. In fact, February 1936 was the coldest month in the nation's history, with a number of cities recording record low temperatures. As a result, when the weather began to warm up in March and April, people breathed a sigh of relief, but it kept getting warmer, and rain ceased to fall in some areas. Still, people maintained hope that each rainstorm would end the heat wave.

They were wrong. June saw temperatures rise to unseasonably warm levels across the American West. Normally warm southern states grew unbearably hot, setting record high temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. Eight record highs that registered in June 1936 still stand today, and July saw no improvement in the temperatures. The heat was bad in the Plains, and at the same time, a sudden heat wave hit the rest of the nation, driving temperatures through the roof along the East Coast. To make matters worse, many areas failed to cool off in the evenings, driving some residents to sleep outside on their lawns to find relief.

By the end of the summer, the heat wave had killed thousands across the nation, and it was still far from over. Humidity remained low, making the heat somewhat more bearable, but it exacerbated the nationwide drought that kept killing crops. The heat and drought became front-page news that even President Roosevelt had to address on a regular basis.

This book looks at one of the toughest years in American history.

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Title: Storming the City

Subtitle: US Military Performance in Urban Warfare from World War II to Vietnam

Author: Alec Wahlman

Narrator: Robert J. Eckrich

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins

Language: English

Release date: 04-20-17

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 2 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

In an increasingly urbanized world, urban terrain has become a greater factor in military operations. Simultaneously, advances in military technology have given military forces sharply increased capabilities. The conflict comes from how urban terrain can negate or degrade many of those increased capabilities. What happens when advanced weapons are used in a close-range urban fight with an abundance of cover?

Storming the City explores these issues by analyzing the performance of the US Army and US Marine Corps in urban combat in four major urban battles of the mid-20th century (Aachen 1944, Manila 1945, Seoul 1950, and Hue 1968). Alec Wahlman assesses each battle using a similar framework of capability categories, and separate chapters address urban warfare in American military thought.

In the four battles, across a wide range of conditions, American forces were ultimately successful in capturing each city because of two factors: transferable competence and battlefield adaptation. The preparations US forces made for warfare writ large proved generally applicable to urban warfare. Battlefield adaptation, a strong suit of American forces, filled in where those overall preparations for combat needed fine tuning. From World War II to Vietnam, however, there was a gradual reduction in tactical performance in the four battles.

The book is published by University of North Texas Press.

Critic Reviews:

"This is a very serious and well executed work. The quantity of knowledge packed into these pages is immense...this book has real value." (Anthony James Joes, Saint Joseph's University)

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Title: James Meredith and the University of Mississippi

Subtitle: The History of the School's Integration During the Civil Rights Movement

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Kenneth Ray

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 33 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-30-17

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

Though Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence wrote that the United States would be founded on the principles that all men were created equal, nearly 200 years would pass before the principle was put into any real practice. Although the end of the Civil War opened the door for the passage of the Civil War Amendments, which abolished slavery, and, in theory, granted the descendants of both free and enslaved blacks the same rights as those enjoyed by whites, those rights were not respected or practiced during the century following the war.

Most aspects of life, including schooling, remained segregated on every level, especially throughout the Jim Crow South, and the years following the desegregation triumph of Brown v. Board of the Education in 1954 saw little done to accomplish the instructions given by the Supreme Court, especially at the university level.

Enter James Meredith, a young man of 28 who decided to make it his life's mission to change that situation. In doing so, he took aim at the very heart of Southern segregation: the University of Mississippi. He might have chosen any school, but Meredith had a special interest in Mississippi, as it was his native state; he had grown up near his hometown's current mayor and likely had something of a personal score to settle, as well as a political one.

He applied to the university in 1961 not only to get an education but to give one in an effort to teach the white people of Mississippi and the nation that they could no longer exclude their black neighbors from their lives. Of course, he also aimed to empower black citizens and demonstrate that they were indeed citizens with the same rights and responsibilities as anyone else.

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Title: The Christmas Truce of 1914

Subtitle: The History of the Holiday Ceasefire During World War I

Author: Charles River Editors

Narrator: Mark Norman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 1 hr and 53 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-23-17

Publisher: Charles River Editors

Genres: History, 20th Century

Publisher's Summary:

On Christmas Day 1914, amid the bloodily stalemated trenches of Flanders just five months into World War I, a memorable event dubbed the Christmas Truce occurred. In place of the rattle of gunfire and the crash of bursting artillery shells, familiar German and English Christmas carols floated through the frosty air. In a number of sectors, officers and men on both sides emerged from their trenches to mingle, exchange Yuletide greetings, give one another small gifts and mementos, and discuss the fighting as language allowed.

The Truce also provided practical advantages in addition to the emotional and perhaps spiritual relief of a pleasant, peaceful day after months of brutal combat. Many men took advantage of the temporary ceasefire to improve their trenches and dugouts, while others brought up firewood and supplies in large quantities, since the "armistice" enabled carrying these items openly rather than crawling through the mud under fire with only small amounts of necessities.

Officers organized burial details to inter the numerous corpses in No-Man's Land, which typically returned identity papers and personal effects of enemy soldiers to their comrades but tended to retain weapons. These burials served both a humanitarian purpose and also freed the living soldiers from the stench and sight of putrid corpses, some of which had lain in the 60 yards between the lines for two months.

The Christmas Truce lasted patchily for several days. The reaction of the soldiers to this extraordinary period of ceasefire and fraternization varied. Some, such as then-corporal Adolf Hitler, who distinguished himself shortly before the Truce by dragging a wounded officer to safety under heavy fire, expressed disgust at mingling with the enemy, even in the Yuletide tradition.

Others entered into the occasion's spirit wholeheartedly, even discussing a permanent peace. Another sizable group welcomed the occasion for a day or two's respite and holiday enjoyment, yet remained keen, refusing to relax their martial impulses or their fierce determination to win. One British soldier, Bruce Bairnsfather, encapsulated this viewpoint forcefully in his wartime memoirs: "There was not an atom of hate on either side that day; and yet, on our side, not for a moment was the will to war and the will to beat them relaxed. It was just like the interval between the rounds in a friendly boxing match." (Bairnsfather, 1916, 92).

Either intellectually or instinctively, some of the German soldiers realized their side lost the war as soon as the first trench line snaked across the sodden earth of Flanders. Many others remained confident of victory, asked the British how long they planned to continue their futile resistance, and also viewed the Truce as a welcome, but temporary, respite from fighting. The Germans initiated the Christmas Truce and managed to extend it for several days despite repeated British messages that it ended along with the holiday.

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