The World category has 419 audiobooks on Listento.it, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2,940 ratings. The most-rated is A Short History of Nearly Everything.
A History of the Twentieth Century
Summary
Martin Gilbert, author of the multivolume biography of Winston Churchill and other brilliant works of history, chronicles world events year by year, from the dawn of aviation to the flourishing technology age, taking us through World War I to the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt as president of the United States and Hider as chancellor of Germany. He continues on to document wars in South Africa, China, Ethiopia, Spain, Korea, Vietnam, and Bosnia, as well as apartheid, the arms race, the moon landing, and the beginnings of the computer age, while interspersing the influence of art, literature, music, and religion throughout this vivid work. A rich, textured look at war, celebration, suffering, life, death, and renewal in the century gone by, this volume is nothing less than extraordinary.
©2001 Martin Gilbert (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC
The Americas
Summary
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a world-renowned scholar, professor of history and geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and a member of the Faculty of Modern History of Oxford University. The Americas, part of the acclaimed Modern Library Chronicles series, offers an intriguing history of the world's western hemisphere.
©2003 Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (P)2003 Recorded Books, LLC
Prince Charles
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of Elizabeth the Queen comes the first major biography of Prince Charles in more than 20 years - perfect for fans of The Crown. Sally Bedell Smith returns once again to the British royal family to give us a new look at Prince Charles, the oldest heir to the throne in more than 300 years. This vivid, eye-opening biography - the product of four years of research and hundreds of interviews with palace officials, former girlfriends, spiritual gurus, and more, some speaking on the record for the first time - is the first authoritative treatment of Charles' life that sheds light on the death of Diana, his marriage to Camilla, and his preparations to take the throne one day. Prince Charles brings to life the real man, with all of his ambitions, insecurities, and convictions. It begins with his lonely childhood, in which he struggled to live up to his father's expectations and sought companionship from the Queen Mother and his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten. It follows him through difficult years at school, his early love affairs, his intellectual quests, his entrepreneurial pursuits, and his intense search for spiritual meaning. It tells of the tragedy of his marriage to Diana; his eventual reunion with his true love, Camilla; and his relationships with William, Kate, Harry, and his grandchildren. Ranging from his glamorous palaces to his country homes, from his globe-trotting travels to his local initiatives, Smith shows how Prince Charles possesses a fiercely independent spirit and yet has spent more than six decades waiting for his destined role, living a life dictated by protocols he often struggles to obey. With keen insight and the discovery of unexpected new details, Smith lays bare the contradictions of a man who is more complicated, tragic, and compelling than we knew - until now. With a preface read by the author.
©2017 Sally Bedell Smith (P)2017 Random House Audio
Black History: History in an Hour
Summary
History for busy people. Black History, or African-American History, looks at the story and culture of black Americans from the seventeenth century to the present day.Encompassing everything from immigration to civil war, emancipation, slavery and migration, Black History in an Hour gives you a neat overview of this vast and fascinating subject.This audio download is a superb introduction to the long and varied history of African Americans. Love your history? Find out about the world with History in an Hour…
©2012 Rupert Colley (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
The Moon
Summary
An intimate portrait of the Earth's closest neighbor - the Moon - that explores the history and future of humankind's relationship with it Every generation has looked towards the heavens and wondered at the beauty of the Moon. Fifty years ago, a few Americans became the first to do the reverse - and Earth-bound audiences shared their view of their own planet hanging in the sky instead. In this short but wide-ranging book, Oliver Morton explores the history and future of humankind's relationship with the Moon from the earliest astronomers such as van Eyck and Galileo through the first space flights and anticipating next phase of our interaction with the Moon, as a portal and stepping stone to further space exploration. The Moon's gentle light has spoken of love and loneliness; its battered surface of death and the cosmic. For some, it is a future on which humankind has turned its back. For others, an adventure yet to begin. Advanced technologies, new ambitions, and old dreams mean that men, women, and robots now seem certain to return to the Moon. What will they learn there about the universe, the Earth - and themselves? And, this time, will they stay? PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2019 Oliver Morton and The Economist (P)2019 Hachette Audio
A Brief History of Portugal
Summary
This is a comprehensive history of Portugal that covers the whole span, from the Stone Age to today. An introduction provides an understanding of geographical and climatic issues, before an examination of Portugal's prehistory and classical Portugal, from the Stone Age to the end of the the Roman era. Portugal's history from AD 420 to the 13th century takes in the Suevi, Visigoths and Moors. Then, a look at medieval Portugal, covers the development of Christian Portugal culminating with the expulsion of the Moors, with a focus on key sites. A subsequent section on Spanish rule, between 1580 and 1640, explains why Spain took over and why Spanish rule collapsed. There is a significant focus on Portugal's global role, particularly during the age of exploration, or expansion, in the 15th century to 1580: Manueline Portugal, Henry the Navigator, Vasco da Gama and Belém. Portugal was the first of the Atlantic empires, with territory in the Azores, Madeira, West Africa and Brazil, and it remained a major empire until the 1820s, retaining an African empire until the 1970s. Its empire in Asia - in Malacca, Macao, Goa and Timor - continued even longer, until the 1990s. Black shows how Portugal had a global impact, but the world, too, had an impact on Portugal. Baroque Portugal, between 1640 and 1800, is explored through palaces in Mafra, Pombal and elsewhere and the wealth of Brazil. The 19th century brought turmoil in the form of a French invasion, the Peninsular War, Brazilian independence, successive revolutions, economic issues and the end of the monarchy. Republican Portugal brought further chaos in the early years of the 20th century, then the dictatorship of Salazar and its end in the Carnation Revolution of 1974. Portugal's role in both world wars is examined, also its wars in Africa. From the overthrow of autocracy to a new constitution and the leadership of Soares, contemporary, democratic Portugal is explored, including the fiscal crisis of recent years. Throughout Black introduces the history and character of the country's principal regions, including the Azores, Madeira and the Cape Verde Islands. He looks at key national sites, at Portuguese food and wine and the arts, with special sections devoted to port, Portugal's famous tiles and the university established at Coimbra in 1290.
©2020 Jeremy Black (P)2020 Hachette Audio UK
World War Two: History in an Hour
Summary
History for busy people. Listen to a succinct history of World War Two in just one hour.World War Two was one of the most devastating conflicts the world has ever seen. Between 1939 and 1945 almost every country in the world was affected by the war in some way.World War Two: History in an Hour neatly covers all the major facts and events giving you a clear and straightforward overview of the politics involved, the violence that ensued and how it changed the world in unimaginable ways. World War Two: History in an Hour is engagingly written and accessible for all history lovers.Love your history? Find out about the world with History in an Hour…
©2012 Rupert Colley (P)2012 HarperCollins Publishers Limited
The Mental Floss History of the World
Summary
About 60,000 years ago, the first Homo sapiens were just beginning their move across the grasslands and up the ladder of civilization. Everything since then, as they say, is history. Just in case you were sleeping in class that day, the geniuses at mental_floss magazine have put together a hilarious (and historically accurate) primer on everything you need to know---and that means the good stuff. Twelve core chapters of world history tackle everything from civilization's baby steps in the Fertile Crescent to the Not-Really-That-Dark-Unless-You-Lived-in-Europe Ages to A World United by Terror and TV. From the Golden Haemorhoids of the Philistines (punishment from above) to the likely namesake of the cartoon elephant Babar (a Mongol prince) to the most pressing language translation issues facing the menus of today ("carp" vs. "crap"), all of history's most interesting bits have finally been handpicked and roasted to perfection.
©2008 Mental Floss LLC (P)2008 Tantor
Adrift
Summary
A story of tragedy at sea, where every desperate act meant life or death. The small ship making the Liverpool-to-New York trip in the early months of 1856 carried mail, crates of dry goods, and more than 100 passengers, mostly Irish emigrants. Suddenly, an iceberg tore the ship asunder, and five lifeboats were lowered. As four lifeboats drifted into the fog and icy water, never to be heard from again, the last boat wrenched away from the sinking ship with a few blankets, some water and biscuits, and 13 souls. Only one would survive. This is his story. As they started their nine days adrift more than 400 miles off Newfoundland, the castaways - an Irish couple and their two boys, an English woman and her daughter, newlyweds from Ireland, and several crewmen, including Thomas W. Nye from Fairhaven, Massachusetts - began fighting over food and water. One by one, though, day by day, they died. Some from exposure, others from madness and panic. In the end, only Nye and the ship's log survived. Using Nye's firsthand descriptions and later newspaper accounts, ship's logs, assorted diaries, and family archives, Brian Murphy chronicles the horrific nine days that 13 people suffered adrift on the cold, gray Atlantic. Adrift brings listeners to the edge of human limits, where every frantic decision and desperate act is a potential life-saver or life-taker. PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.
©2018 Brian Murphy and Toula Vlahou (P)2018 Hachette Audio
Thunder at Twilight
Summary
Thunder at Twilight is a landmark historical vision, drawing on hitherto untapped sources to illuminate two crucial years in the life of the extraordinary city of Vienna - and in the life of the 20th century. It was during the carnival of 1913 that a young Stalin arrived in Vienna on a mission that would launch him into the upper echelon of Russian revolutionaries, and it was here that he first collided with Trotsky. It was in Vienna that the failed artist Adolf Hitler kept daubing watercolors and spouting tirades at fellow drifters in a flophouse. Here, Archduke Franz Ferdinand had a troubled audience with Emperor Franz Joseph - and soon the bullet that killed the archduke would set off the Great War that would kill 10 million more. With luminous prose that has twice made him a finalist for the National Book Award, Frederic Morton evokes the opulent, elegant, incomparable sunset metropolis - Vienna on the brink of cataclysm.
©2014 Frederic Morton (P)2015 Random House Audio
The Middle Ages: A History From Beginning to End
Summary
What do you think of when you consider the Middle Ages? Knights in armor and damsels in distress? Vikings plundering monasteries? Religious dissenters burning at the stake? The dead bodies piling up as war, famine, and plague devastated Europe? Think again. While all these are part of the tapestry of the medieval era, the threads of politics, personality and war, culture, religion, education and the arts are vastly more intricate and fascinating. Think Charlemagne, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Joan of Arc, Peter Abelard, Geoffrey Chaucer and a riveting cast of thousands. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Western Europe had to reinvent itself and redefine its philosophical parentage. Inside you will hear about... The Early Middle Ages Advancing to Empire with Charlemagne The High Middle Ages The Flowering of the Church Times of Change The Late Middle Ages The End and the Beginning As the Christian Church filled the void left by the loss of Roman authority, nations would emerge out of blurred geographical boundaries and dynastic kings would evolve from warlords. Rome gets the glory, and the Renaissance gets the glamor, but they are bookends for the dynamic centuries that are known as the Middle Ages.
©2016 Hourly History (P)2017 Hourly History
Conquistador Voices
Summary
The Spanish Conquest: What really happened? If you like to use your drive time for education by audiobook, consider this audiobook for widening and deepening your view of an event you studied briefly in school - the Spanish conquest of the Americas. Conquistador Voices, which relies more heavily than most works of this kind on first-person accounts, neither glamorizes nor condemns the conquistadors. Somewhat in the manner of a modern film documentary, it treats the so-called conquest as an historical event that’s worth learning about for its own sake, with most of the moralizing left to the listener. In two volumes, Conquistador Voices covers five high-profile personages and their respective roles in this epochal event. Vol I features the voyages of Christopher Columbus and the conquest of Mexico by Hernán Cortés, while vol II provides an in-depth look at the conquest of Peru by Francisco Pizarro, the years-long desert odyssey of Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, and the North American expedition of Hernando de Soto. Both volumes get deeply into details of Native American life in those times. Spice up your drive time with this entertaining and educational audiobook excursion into the past.
©2015 Kevin H Siepel (P)2020 Kevin H Siepel
Animal, Vegetable, Junk
Summary
From hunting and gathering to GMOs and ultra-processed foods, this expansive tour of human history rewrites the story of our species - and points the way to a better future. The history of Homo sapiens is usually told as a story of technology or economics. But there is a more fundamental driver: food. How we hunted and gathered explains our emergence as a new species and our earliest technology; our first food systems, from fire to agriculture, tell where we settled and how civilizations expanded. The quest for food for growing populations drove exploration, colonialism, slavery, even capitalism. A century ago, food was industrialized. Since then, new styles of agriculture and food production have written a new chapter of human history, one that’s driving both climate change and global health crises. Best-selling food authority Mark Bittman offers a panoramic view of the story and explains how we can rescue ourselves from the modern wrong turn.
©2021 Mark Bittman (P)2021 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
At the Edge of Uncertainty
Summary
The best-selling author of Free Radicals takes listeners on a whirlwind tour of the most controversial areas of modern science. The atom, the big bang, DNA, natural selection - all are ideas that have revolutionized science; and all were dismissed out of hand when they first appeared. The surprises haven't stopped in recent years, and in At the Edge of Uncertainty, best-selling author Michael Brooks investigates the new wave of radical insights that are shaping the future of scientific discovery. Brooks takes us to the extreme frontiers of what we understand about the world. He journeys from the observations that might rewrite our story of how the cosmos came to be, through the novel biology behind our will to live, and on to the physiological root of consciousness. Along the way, he examines how it's time to redress the gender imbalance in clinical trials, explores how merging humans with other species might provide a solution to the shortage of organ donors, and finds out whether the universe really is like a computer or if the flow of time is a mere illusion.
©2014 Michael Brooks (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Industrial Revolution
Summary
Explore the captivating history of the Industrial Revolution! For most of human existence, people lived in a somewhat similar fashion. Everything that has been produced, from food and raw materials to clothing and other finished products, has been done either solely by hand or with some help of animal power. This was the same across the eras and throughout the world, no matter how advanced or backward the various civilizations were. Yet, our lives today couldn’t be more different. Most of our products are made by machines and mechanical power, allowing for greater productivity and a higher quality of life, in general. That advance was made possible by what we today call the Industrial Revolution. Its start in the mid-18th century signalized a slow but unwavering transformation from a handmade manufacturing civilization to a machine-powered industrial society. In The Industrial Revolution: A Captivating Guide to a Period of Major Industrialization and the Introduction of the Spinning Jenny, the Cotton Gin, Electricity, and Other Inventions, you will discover topics, such as: Birth of the Revolution British Motors Start Rolling Cogs of the Revolution Dissemination of Change Sparks of a New Revolution Effects of the Transformation And much, much more! So, if you want to learn more about the Industrial Revolution, scroll up and click the "buy now" button!
©2020 Captivating History (P)2020 Captivating History
Barons of the Sea
Summary
In the grand tradition of David McCullough and Ron Chernow, the sweeping story of the 19th-century American dynasties who battled for dominance of the tea and opium trades. There was a time, back when the United States was young and the robber barons were just starting to come into their own, when fortunes were made and lost importing luxury goods from China. It was a secretive, glamorous, often brutal business - one where teas and silks and porcelain were purchased with profits from the opium trade. But the journey by sea to New York from Canton could take six agonizing months, and so the most pressing technological challenge of the day became ensuring one’s goods arrived first to market, so they might fetch the highest price. Barons of the Sea tells the story of a handful of cutthroat competitors who raced to build the fastest, finest, most profitable clipper ships to carry their precious cargo to American shores. They were visionary, eccentric shipbuilders, debonair captains, and socially-ambitious merchants with names like Forbes and Delano - men whose business interests took them from the cloistered confines of China’s expatriate communities to the sin city decadence of Gold Rush-era San Francisco, and from the teeming hubbub of East Boston’s shipyards and to the lavish sitting rooms of New York’s Hudson Valley estates. Elegantly written and meticulously researched, Barons of the Sea is a riveting tale of innovation and ingenuity that draws back the curtain on the making of some of the nation’s greatest fortunes, and the rise and fall of an all-American industry as sordid as it was genteel.
©2018 Steven Ujifusa (P)2018 Simon & Schuster
The First Voyage Round the World by Magellan
Summary
Pigafetta's book on Magellan’s travels is an engaging travel narrative honoring the legendary explorer. But it is much more: an accurate ethnographic and geographical account of the circumnavigation of the globe. Pifagetta describes the peoples, countries, goods, and even the languages that were spoken in every area.
Public Domain (P)2018 Museum Audiobooks
Prehistoric Burial Rites and Advances in Metallurgy in the Bronze Age: Archaeology of Britain
Summary
Find out how metal working developed during the Bronze Age Burial rites underwent a massive change in prehistoric times - find out what happened! Find out what changes occurred, how methods and techniques developed in metal working. The Bronze Age as defined by the three-age system dates from 2500 BC to 600 BC and originally provided a convenient chronology of the subdivision of technological advances. The period is important in that it sees the spread of the use of metals and witnesses the development of metallurgy techniques to make the most of these new resources. Based on evidence from the archaeological record in the United Kingdom, Troy Newton takes an in-depth look at how burial rites changed between the second and third millennium BC. You'll find out: What happened to the long barrows When and why grave goods were included When the change occurred from excarnation to inhumation When ancestor worship changed to a more individual focus Buy this audiobook now!
©2018 Troy Newton (P)2018 Troy Newton
Millennium
Summary
History's greatest tour guide, Ian Mortimer, takes us on an eye-opening and expansive journey through the last millennium of human innovation. In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change. We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict with each other on an epic scale. Here is a story of godly scientists, fearless adventurers, coldhearted entrepreneurs, and strong-minded women - a story of discovery, invention, revolution, and cataclysmic shifts in perspective. Millennium is a journey into the past like no other. Our understanding of human development will never be the same again, and the lessons we learn along the way are profound ones for us all.
©2014 Ian Mortimer (P)2016 Audible, Inc.
The Glory and the Dream
Summary
This great time capsule of a book captures the abundant popular history of the United States from 1932 to 1972. It encompasses politics, military history, economics, the lively arts, science, fashion, fads, social change, sexual mores, communications, graffiti...everything and anything indigenous that can be captured in print. The Glory and the Dream chronicles the progress of life in the United States, from the time William Manchester and his generation reached the beginning of awareness in the desperate summer of '32 to President Nixon's Second Inaugural Address and the opening scenes of Watergate. Masterfully compressing four crowded decades of our history, Manchester relives the epic, significant, or just memorable events that befell the generation of Americans whose lives pivoted between the America before and the America after the Second World War.
©1974 William Manchester (P)1994 Blackstone Audio, Inc.