Listen to Top 100 Audiobooks in History, American

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Title: America Bewitched

Subtitle: The Story of Witchcraft After Salem

Author: Owen Davies

Narrator: J. Paul Guimont

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-01-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 13 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

America Bewitched is the first major history of witchcraft in America - from the Salem witch trials of 1692 to the present day.

The infamous Salem trials are etched into the consciousness of modern America, the human toll a reminder of the dangers of intolerance and persecution. The refrain 'Remember Salem!' was invoked frequently over the ensuing centuries. As time passed, the trials became a milepost measuring the distance America had progressed from its colonial past, its victims now the righteous and their persecutors the shamed. Yet the story of witchcraft did not end as the American Enlightenment dawned - a new, long, and chilling chapter was about to begin.

Witchcraft after Salem was not just a story of fire-side tales, legends, and superstitions: it continued to be a matter of life and death, souring the American dream for many. We know of more people killed as witches between 1692 and the 1950s than were executed before it. Witches were part of the story of the decimation of the Native Americans, the experience of slavery and emancipation, and the immigrant experience; they were embedded in the religious and social history of the country. Yet the history of American witchcraft between the 18th and the 20th century also tells a less traumatic story, one that shows how different cultures interacted and shaped each other's languages and beliefs. This is therefore much more than the tale of one persecuted community: it opens a fascinating window on the fears, prejudices, hopes, and dreams of the American people as their country rose from colony to superpower.

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Title: Six Women of Salem

Subtitle: The Untold Story of the Accused and Their Accusers in the Salem Witch Trials

Author: Marilynne K. Roach

Narrator: Kate Reading

Format: Unabridged

Length: 17 hrs and 8 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-17-14

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 3.5 of 5 out of 45 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Six Women of Salem is the first work to use the lives of a select number of representative women as a microcosm to illuminate the larger crisis of the Salem witch trials. By the end of the trials, beyond the 20 who were executed and the five who perished in prison, 207 individuals had been accused, 74 had been "afflicted", 32 had officially accused their fellow neighbors, and 255 ordinary people had been inexorably drawn into that ruinous and murderous vortex, and this doesn't include the religious, judicial, and governmental leaders. All this adds up to what the Rev. Cotton Mather called "a desolation of names".

The individuals involved are too often reduced to stock characters and stereotypes when accuracy is sacrificed to indignation. And although the flood of names and detail in the history of an extraordinary event like the Salem witch trials can swamp the individual lives involved, individuals still deserve to be remembered, and, in remembering specific lives, modern audiences can benefit from such historical intimacy. By examining the lives of six specific women, Marilynne Roach shows listeners what it was like to be present throughout this horrific time and how it was impossible to live through it unchanged.

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Title: Labor's Story in the United States

Author: Philip Nicholson

Narrator: Brian E. Smith

Format: Unabridged

Length: 18 hrs and 41 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-25-14

Publisher: University Press Audiobooks

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 22 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

In this, the first broad historical overview of labor in the United States in 20 years, Philip Nicholson examines anew the questions, the villains, the heroes, and the issues of work in America. Unlike recent books that have covered labor in the 20th century, Labor's Story in the United States looks at the broad landscape of labor since before the Revolution. In clear, unpretentious language, Philip Yale Nicholson considers American labor history from the perspective of institutions and people: the rise of unions, the struggles over slavery, wages, and child labor, public and private responses to union organizing. Throughout, the audiobook focuses on the integral relationship between the strength of labor and the growth of democracy, painting a vivid picture of the strength of labor movements and how they helped make the United States what it is today. Labor's Story in the United States will become an indispensable source for scholars and students. Author note: Philip Yale Nicholson is Professor of History at Nassau Community College and Adjunct Professor at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Long Island Extension. He is the author of Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern World.

Critic Reviews:

A monumental work that prods us to consider the fate of labor and democracy." (Labor Studies Journal)

"This is a wonderfully comprehensive narrative of American labor, full of insight and shrewd judgments." (Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara, and author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor)

Fill[s] a void in labor history by presenting the breadth of its struggles in one highly readable volume." (Science & Society)

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Title: Donovan

Subtitle: Americas Master Spy

Author: Richard Dunlop, William Stephenson (foreward)

Narrator: Eric Martin

Format: Unabridged

Length: 25 hrs and 5 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-14-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 89 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

The fascinating biography of the man who laid the foundation for the CIA. One of the most celebrated and highly decorated heroes of World War I, a noted trial lawyer, presidential adviser and emissary, and chief of Americas Office of Strategic Services during World War II, William J. Donovan was a legendary figure. Donovan, originally published in 1982, penetrates the cloak of secrecy surrounding this remarkable man. During the dark days of World War II, "Wild Bill" Donovan, more than any other person, was responsible for what William Stevenson, author of A Man Called Intrepid, described as the astonishing success with which the United States entered secret warfare and accomplished in less than four years what it took England many centuries to develop. Drawing upon Donovans diaries, letters, and other papers; interviews with hundreds of the men and women who worked with him and spied for him; and declassified and unpublished documents, author Richard Dunlop, himself a former member of Donovans OSS, traces the incredible career of the man who almost single-handedly created Americas central intelligence service. The result is the definitive biography that Donovan himself had always expected Dunlop would write.

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Title: The Race Underground

Subtitle: Boston, New York, and the Incredible Rivalry That Built America's First Subway

Author: Doug Most

Narrator: John H. Mayer

Format: Unabridged

Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins

Language: English

Release date: 02-04-14

Publisher: Random House Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 97 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

In the late nineteenth century, as cities like Boston and New York grew larger, the streets became increasingly clogged with horse-drawn carts. When the great blizzard of 1888 brought New York City to a halt, a solution had to be found. Two brothers - Henry Melville Whitney of Boston and William Collins Whitney of New York City - pursued the dream of his city being the first American metropolis to have a subway and the great race was on. The competition between Boston and New York was played out in an era not unlike our own, one of economic upheaval, job losses, bitter political tensions, and the question of America's place in the world.

The Race Underground is peopled with the famous, like Boss Tweed, and Thomas Edison, and the not-so-famous, like the countless "sandhogs" who dug and blasted into the earth's crust, sometimes losing their lives in the process of building the subway's tunnels. Doug Most chronicles the science of the subway, looks at fears people had about travelling underground and tells a story as exciting as any ever ripped from the pages of U.S. history. The Race Underground is a great American saga of two rival American cities, the powerful interests within, and an invention that changed the lives of millions.

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Title: The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn

Subtitle: Gentrification and the Search for Authenticity in Postwar New York

Author: Suleiman Osman

Narrator: Marc Cashman

Format: Unabridged

Length: 13 hrs and 42 mins

Language: English

Release date: 01-29-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 10 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation. Challenging the conventional wisdom that New York City's renaissance started in the 1990s, Osman locates the origins of gentrification in Brooklyn in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s.

Gentrification began as a grassroots movement led by young and idealistic white college graduates searching for "authenticity" and life outside the burgeoning suburbs. Where postwar city leaders championed slum clearance and modern architecture, "brownstoners" (as they called themselves) fought for a new romantic urban ideal that celebrated historic buildings, industrial lofts and traditional ethnic neighborhoods as a refuge from an increasingly technocratic society.

Osman examines the emergence of a "slow-growth" progressive coalition as brownstoners joined with poorer residents to battle city planners and local machine politicians. But as brownstoners migrated into poorer areas, race and class tensions emerged, and by the 1980s, as newspapers parodied yuppies and anti-gentrification activists marched through increasingly expensive neighborhoods, brownstoners debated whether their search for authenticity had been a success or failure. The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn deftly mixes architectural, cultural and political history in this eye-opening perspective on the post-industrial city.

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Title: Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination

Subtitle: The Untold Story of the Actors and Stagehands at Ford's Theatre

Author: Thomas A. Bogar

Narrator: R. C. Bray

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 55 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-04-13

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 24 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage, and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford's Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, "Burn the place down!"

This is the untold story of Lincoln's assassination: The forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night, and what each of them witnessed in the chaos-streaked hours before John Wilkes Booth was discovered to be the culprit.

In Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination, historian Thomas A. Bogar delves into previously unpublished sources to tell the story of Lincoln's assassination from behind the curtain, and the tale is shocking. Police rounded up and arrested dozens of innocent people, wasting time that allowed the real culprit to get further away. Some closely connected to John Wilkes Booth were not even questioned, while innocent witnesses were relentlessly pursued. Booth was more connected with the production than you might have known - learn how he knew each member of the cast and crew, which was a hotbed of secessionist resentment. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination also tells the story of what happened to each of these witnesses to history after the investigation was over - and how each one lived their lives after seeing one of America's greatest presidents shot dead without warning.

Critic Reviews:

"Dr. Bogar's scholarship is original and impeccable. With stunning clarity, this vivid narrative shines a light into the shadows and behind the scenes of the most resonant crime in American history. Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination is an indispensable resource for understanding the width, breadth and scope of the tragedy at Ford's Theatre." (Erik Jendresen, writer/producer of Killing Lincoln and Band of Brothers)

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Title: Washed Away

Subtitle: How the Great Flood of 1913, Americas Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever

Author: Geoff Williams

Narrator: Jim Vann

Format: Unabridged

Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-29-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 29 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

The incredible story of a flood of near-Biblical proportions - its destruction, its heroes and victims, and how it shaped Americas natural-disaster policies for the next century.

The storm began March 23, 1913, with a series of tornadoes that killed 150 people and injured 400. Then the freezing rains started and the flooding began. It continued for days. Some people drowned in their attics, others on the roads when they tried to flee. It was the nations most widespread flood ever - more than 700 people died, hundreds of thousands of homes and buildings were destroyed, and millions were left homeless.

The destruction extended far beyond the Ohio valley to Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. Fourteen states in all, and every major and minor river east of the Mississippi.

In the aftermath, flaws in Americas natural disaster response system were exposed, echoing todays outrage over Katrina. People demanded change. Laws were passed, and dams were built. Teams of experts vowed to develop flood control techniques for the region and stop flooding for good. So far those efforts have succeeded.

It is estimated that in the Miami Valley alone, nearly 2,000 floods have been prevented, and the same methods have been used as a model for flood control nationwide and around the world.

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Title: Camelot's Court

Subtitle: Inside the Kennedy White House

Author: Robert Dallek

Narrator: James Lurie

Format: Unabridged

Length: 16 hrs and 50 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-08-13

Publisher: HarperAudio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 43 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Fifty years after John F. Kennedy's assassination, presidential historian Robert Dallek, whom The New York Times calls "Kennedy's leading biographer", delivers a riveting new portrait of this president and his inner circle of advisors, their rivalries, personality clashes, and political battles. In Camelot's Court, Dallek analyzes the brain trust whose contributions to the successes and failures of Kennedy's administration - including the Bay of Pigs, civil rights, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam - were indelible.

Kennedy purposefully put together a dynamic team of advisors noted for their brilliance and acumen, including Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and trusted aides Ted Sorensen and Arthur Schlesinger. Yet the very traits these men shared also created sharp divisions. Far from being unified, this was an uneasy band of rivals whose ambitions and clashing beliefs ignited fiery internal debates.

Robert Dallek illuminates a president deeply determined to surround himself with the best and the brightest, who often found himself disappointed with their recommendations. The result, Camelot's Court: Inside the Kennedy White House, is a striking portrait of a leader whose wise resistance to pressure and adherence to principle offers a cautionary tale for our own time.

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Title: Who Discovered America?

Subtitle: The Untold History of the Peopling of the Americas

Author: Gavin Menzies, Ian Hudson

Narrator: Gildart Jackson

Format: Unabridged

Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins

Language: English

Release date: 10-08-13

Publisher: HarperAudio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 52 votes

Genres: History, American

Publisher's Summary:

Greatly expanding on his blockbuster 1421, distinguished historian Gavin Menzies uncovers the complete untold history of how mankind came to the Americas - offering new revelations and a radical rethinking of the accepted historical record in Who Discovered America?

The iconoclastic historian's magnum opus, Who Discovered America? calls into question our understanding of how the American continents were settled, shedding new light on the well-known "discoveries" of European explorers, including Christopher Columbus. In Who Discovered America? he combines meticulous research and an adventurer's spirit to reveal astounding new evidence of an ancient Asian seagoing tradition - most notably the Chinese - that dates as far back as 130,000 years ago.

Menzies offers a revolutionary new alternative to the "Beringia" theory of how humans crossed a land bridge connecting Asia and North America during the last Ice Age, and provides a wealth of staggering claims, that hold fascinating and astonishing implications for the history of mankind.

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