20th Century

The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century....

The #1 New York Times bestseller, now in an expanded audiobook edition that includes detailed historical context for the democracy-threatening Ukrainian conflict and a call to action for modern times....

As the child of refugees of World War II Europe and a renowned philosopher and scholar of propaganda, Jason Stanley has a deep understanding of how democratic societies can be vulnerable to fascism: Nations don’t have to be fascist to suffer from fascist politics....

Night is an unmistakably autobiographical account of the author's own gruesome experiences in Nazi Germany's death camps....

Based on the newly released personal letters of Albert Einstein, Walter Isaacson explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos....

A brilliant exploration of freedom—what it is, how it’s been misunderstood, and why it’s our only chance for survival—by the acclaimed Yale historian and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Tyranny.

In this uplifting memoir in the vein of The Last Lecture and Man’s Search for Meaning, a Holocaust survivor pays tribute to those who were lost by telling his story, sharing his wisdom, and living his best possible life....

At one time, Corrie ten Boom would have laughed at the idea that she had a story to tell.....

Erik Larson has been widely acclaimed as a master of narrative non-fiction, and in his new book, turns his hand to a remarkable story set during Hitler’s rise to power....

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

A powerful, moving memoir - and a practical guide to healing - written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger, an eminent psychologist whose own experiences as a Holocaust survivor help her treat patients....

Listen "live" to one of the most iconic orators of all times in this packed-full collection of Martin Luther King Jr. speeches....

This is the definitive story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story....

Now with an epilogue that speaks directly to the current energy crisis, The Prize recounts the panoramic history of the world’s most important resource—oil.

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

In the 1970s, a new wave of feminism was sweeping America. But in the boys’ club of banking and finance, women were still infantilized—no credit without a male cosigner, and their income was dismissed as unreliable. If bankers weren’t going to accommodate women, then women had to take control of their own futures. In 1978 in Denver, Colorado, the opening of the Women’s Bank changed everything.

For millennia, land has been a symbol of wealth and privilege. But the true power of land ownership is even greater than we might think. In Land Power, political scientist Michael Albertus shows that who owns the land determines whether a society will be equal or unequal, whether it will develop or decline, and whether it will safeguard or sacrifice its environment.

In a memorable scene from Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, viewers the world over witnessed the clandestine marriage of two Jews in the Płaszów concentration camp: Joseph and Rebecca Bau. At once a tale of horror and beauty, Bau: Artist at War is one man’s memoir of a miracle: the bloom of love in the depths of a Nazi concentration camp. In his painstaking prose, Joseph Bau also shares his experience of other wartime traumas—the bombing of Kraków, the brutality of the ghetto, the harsh last days at Oskar Schindler’s factory—with surprising wit and irony.

An authoritative, insightful, and highly engaging history of the twentieth-century global economy, updated with a new chapter on the early decades of the new century. Global Capitalism guides the listener from the globalization of the early twentieth century and its swift collapse in the crises of 1914–45, to the return to global integration at the end of the century, and the subsequent retreat in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008.

Long before their country officially joined the war, American aid workers were active in rescue efforts across Europe. Two such Americans were Martha and Waitstill Sharp, who were originally sent to Prague as part of a relief effort but turned immediately to helping Jews and dissidents after the 1939 invasion by Germany. They were not the only ones. Renowned historian Debórah Dwork follows the story of rescue workers in five major cities as the refugee crisis expanded to Vilna, Shanghai, Marseille, and Lisbon. Followed by Nazi agents, spiriting people across borders, they learned secrecy.