
Rot
An Imperial History of the Irish Famine
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Narrated by:
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Stephen Hogan
About this listen
A revelatory new history of the Irish Great Famine, showing how the British Empire caused Ireland’s most infamous disaster
In 1845, European potato fields from Spain to Scandinavia were attacked by a novel pathogen. But it was only in Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, that the blight’s devastation reached apocalyptic levels, leaving more than a million people dead and forcing millions more to emigrate.
In Rot, historian Padraic X. Scanlan offers the definitive account of the Great Famine, showing how Ireland’s place in the United Kingdom and the British Empire made it uniquely vulnerable to starvation. Ireland’s overreliance on the potato was a desperate adaptation to an unstable and unequal marketplace created by British colonialism. The empire’s laissez-faire economic policies saw Ireland exporting livestock and grain even as its people starved. When famine struck, relief efforts were premised on the idea that only free markets and wage labor could save the Irish. Ireland’s wretchedness, before and during the Great Famine, was often blamed on Irish backwardness, but in fact, it resulted from the British Empire’s embrace of modern capitalism.
Uncovering the disaster’s roots in Britain’s deep imperial faith in markets, commerce, and capitalism, Rot reshapes our understanding of the Great Famine and its tragic legacy.
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- Sunni, Shia and the Making of the Middle East
- By: Barnaby Rogerson
- Narrated by: Keval Shah
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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At the heart of the Middle East, with its regional conflicts and proxy wars, is a 1400-year-old schism between Sunni and Shia. To understand this divide and its modern resonances, we need to revisit its origins—which go back to the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632; the accidental coup that set aside the claims of his son Ali; and the slaughter of Ali's own son Husayn at Karbala. These events, known to every Muslim, have created a slender fault line in the Middle East.
By: Barnaby Rogerson
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Out of the Darkness
- The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson: 150th Anniversary Edition
- By: Eric A. Shelman, Stephen Lazoritz M.D.
- Narrated by: Eric A. Shelman
- Length: 10 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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It's now been over 150 years since ASPCA agents, at the direction of founder Henry Bergh, rescued little Mary Ellen Wilson from her abusive New York tenement home back in 1874. It's also been over 25 years since Eric A. Shelman and Stephen Lazoritz, M.D. released Out of the Darkness: The Story of Mary Ellen Wilson, which remains the only book about the little girl's case.
By: Eric A. Shelman, and others
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Let Only Red Flowers Bloom
- Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping's China
- By: Emily Feng
- Narrated by: Emily Feng
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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The rise of China and its great power competition with the U.S. will be one of the defining issues of our generation. But to understand modern China, one has to understand the people who live there–and the way the Chinese state is trying to control them along lines of identity and free expression. In vivid, cinematic detail, Let Only Red Flowers Bloom tells the stories of nearly two dozen people who are pushing back.
By: Emily Feng
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Rain of Ruin
- Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan
- By: Richard Overy
- Narrated by: Ralph Lister
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In 1945, US air attacks in Japan killed 300,000 civilians in three hours of night bombing and two nuclear strikes. The firebombing of Tokyo in March burned almost the entire city, killed some 85,000 residents, and left more than 1 million homeless. The atomic blast in Hiroshima in August killed some 119,000 civilians and 20,000 soldiers. After a second nuclear attack days later in Nagasaki and a declaration of war by the Soviet Union, Japan accepted defeat.
By: Richard Overy
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The Fifteen
- Murder, Retribution, and the Forgotten Story of Nazi POWs in America
- By: William Geroux
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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The revelatory true story of the long-forgotten POW camps for German soldiers erected in hundreds of small U.S. towns during World War II, and the secret Nazi killings that ensnared fifteen brave American POWs in a high-stakes showdown.
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A part of American history I’d never heard about
- By Janet Stanek on 05-13-25
By: William Geroux
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Baltic
- The Future of Europe
- By: Oliver Moody
- Narrated by: Kaffe Keating
- Length: 11 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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The Baltic's time has come. It is not only critical to Europe's security and increasingly a centre of political and military power in its own right; it is a reservoir of ideas and experiences that could shape the continent's future. This books explores the history, their culture, their peculiarities and national dilemmas of all nine Baltic countries. At its core is a search for fresh answers to Europe's problems, at a point where the continent's previously dominant powers appear tired and divided.
By: Oliver Moody
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Naples 1944
- The Devil's Paradise at War
- By: Keith Lowe
- Narrated by: Richard Trinder
- Length: 15 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Keith Lowe has chronicled the end of WWII in Europe in Savage Continent and the war's aftermath in The Fear and the Freedom. In Naples 1944, he brings listeners another chronicle of the terrible and often unexpected consequences of war. Even before the fall of Mussolini, Naples was a place of great contrasts filled with palaces and slums, beloved cuisine and widespread hunger. After the Allied liberation, these contrasts made the city notorious. Compared to the starving population, Allied soldiers were staggeringly wealthy.
By: Keith Lowe
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American Laughter, American Fury
- Humor and the Making of a White Man's Democracy, 1750–1850
- By: Eran A. Zelnik
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Eran A. Zelnik offers a cultural history of early America that shows how humor among white men served to define and construct not only whiteness and masculinity but also American political culture and democracy more generally. Zelnik traces the emerging bonds of affinity that white male settlers in North America cultivated through their shared, transformative experience of mirth. This humor—a category that includes not only jokes but also play, riot, revelry, and mimicry—shaped the democratic and anti-elitist sensibilities of Americans.
By: Eran A. Zelnik
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The Famine Plot
- England's Role in Ireland's Greatest Tragedy
- By: Tim Pat Coogan
- Narrated by: Roger Clark
- Length: 11 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In this sweeping history, Ireland's best-known historian, Tim Pat Coogan, tackles the dark history of the Irish Famine and argues that it constituted one of the first acts of genocide. In what the Boston Globe calls "his greatest achievement", Coogan shows how the British government hid behind the smoke screen of laissez faire economics, the invocation of divine providence, and a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, allowing more than a million people to die agonizing deaths and driving a further million into emigration.
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Atrocities abound.
- By GMJ on 06-05-18
By: Tim Pat Coogan
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The Wayfinder
- The Life of the Late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Founding President of the United Arab Emirates
- By: Daniel Slack-Smith
- Narrated by: Ramiz Monsef
- Length: 4 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
The Wayfinder tells the story of the life of the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founding President of the United Arab Emirates, and explores the key relationships, challenges and events that shaped his outlook on the world.
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A Genocide Foretold
- Reporting on Survival and Resistance in Occupied Palestine
- By: Chris Hedges
- Narrated by: Ali Nasser
- Length: 6 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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A Genocide Foretold confronts the stark realities of life under siege in Gaza and the heroic effort ordinary Palestinians are waging to resist and survive. Weaving together personal stories, historical context, and unflinching journalism, Chris Hedges provides an intimate portrait of systemic oppression, occupation, and violence.
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The Pain is Unbearable
- By A. J. Wind on 05-13-25
By: Chris Hedges
Some new insights
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Really great work of history
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