-
Gunpowder Girls
- The True Stories of Three Civil War Tragedies
- Narrated by: Carrie Olsen
- Length: 2 hrs and 3 mins
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Buy for $6.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
The Johnstown Flood
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.
-
-
A page-turner! HIstory that reads like a novel
- By Susan K Donley on 06-17-05
By: David McCullough
-
Black Fortunes
- The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires
- By: Shomari Wills
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The astonishing untold history of America's first Black millionaires - former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian period to the Roaring '20s - self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison.
-
-
True His/Herstory
- By Brazy Brazy on 06-25-18
By: Shomari Wills
-
Chicago's Great Fire
- The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City
- By: Carl Smith
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an acclaimed historian, the full and authoritative story of one of the most iconic disasters in American history, told through the vivid memories of those who experienced it. Carl Smith’s compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle.
By: Carl Smith
-
The Great Fire
- By: Jim Murphy
- Narrated by: Taylor Mali
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Great Fire of 1871 was one of the most colossal disasters in American history - with damage so profound that few people believed the city could ever rise again. By weaving personal accounts of actual survivors together with careful research, Jim Murphy constructs a riveting and dramatic narrative, ultimately revealing how the human spirit triumphed even in a time of deepest despair and the people of Chicago found the courage and strength to build their city once again.
-
-
Wow. I didn't know that!
- By DonnaMarie113 on 02-17-22
By: Jim Murphy
-
Dutch Girl
- Audrey Hepburn and World War II
- By: Robert Matzen, Luca Dotti - foreword
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."
-
-
Beautiful story about a beautiful life
- By marykk on 07-02-19
By: Robert Matzen, and others
-
Hiroshima
- By: John Hersey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A journalistic masterpiece. John Hersey transports us back to the streets of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 - the day the city was destroyed by the first atomic bomb. Told through the memories of six survivors, Hiroshima is a timeless, powerful classic that will awaken your heart and your compassion. In this new edition, Hersey returns to Hiroshima to find the survivors - and to tell their fates in an eloquent and moving final chapter.
-
-
A Concise, Devastating, and Uplifting Prose Poem
- By Jefferson on 08-05-16
By: John Hersey
-
The Johnstown Flood
- By: David McCullough
- Narrated by: Edward Herrmann
- Length: 9 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
At the end of the last century, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a booming coal-and-steel town filled with hardworking families striving for a piece of the nation's burgeoning industrial prosperity. In the mountains above Johnstown, an old earth dam had been hastily rebuilt to create a lake for an exclusive summer resort patronized by the tycoons of that same industrial prosperity, among them Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, and Andrew Mellon.
-
-
A page-turner! HIstory that reads like a novel
- By Susan K Donley on 06-17-05
By: David McCullough
-
Black Fortunes
- The Story of the First Six African Americans Who Escaped Slavery and Became Millionaires
- By: Shomari Wills
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The astonishing untold history of America's first Black millionaires - former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian period to the Roaring '20s - self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison.
-
-
True His/Herstory
- By Brazy Brazy on 06-25-18
By: Shomari Wills
-
Chicago's Great Fire
- The Destruction and Resurrection of an Iconic American City
- By: Carl Smith
- Narrated by: David de Vries
- Length: 10 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From an acclaimed historian, the full and authoritative story of one of the most iconic disasters in American history, told through the vivid memories of those who experienced it. Carl Smith’s compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle.
By: Carl Smith
-
The Great Fire
- By: Jim Murphy
- Narrated by: Taylor Mali
- Length: 2 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Great Fire of 1871 was one of the most colossal disasters in American history - with damage so profound that few people believed the city could ever rise again. By weaving personal accounts of actual survivors together with careful research, Jim Murphy constructs a riveting and dramatic narrative, ultimately revealing how the human spirit triumphed even in a time of deepest despair and the people of Chicago found the courage and strength to build their city once again.
-
-
Wow. I didn't know that!
- By DonnaMarie113 on 02-17-22
By: Jim Murphy
-
Dutch Girl
- Audrey Hepburn and World War II
- By: Robert Matzen, Luca Dotti - foreword
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Twenty-five years after her passing, Audrey Hepburn remains the most beloved of all Hollywood stars, known as much for her role as UNICEF ambassador as for films like Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany's. Several biographies have chronicled her stardom, but none has covered her intense experiences through five years of Nazi occupation in the Netherlands. According to her son, Luca Dotti, "The war made my mother who she was."
-
-
Beautiful story about a beautiful life
- By marykk on 07-02-19
By: Robert Matzen, and others
-
Hiroshima
- By: John Hersey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 5 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A journalistic masterpiece. John Hersey transports us back to the streets of Hiroshima, Japan on August 6, 1945 - the day the city was destroyed by the first atomic bomb. Told through the memories of six survivors, Hiroshima is a timeless, powerful classic that will awaken your heart and your compassion. In this new edition, Hersey returns to Hiroshima to find the survivors - and to tell their fates in an eloquent and moving final chapter.
-
-
A Concise, Devastating, and Uplifting Prose Poem
- By Jefferson on 08-05-16
By: John Hersey
-
To Hell and Back
- The Last Train from Hiroshima
- By: Charles Pellegrino
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 18 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To Hell and Back offers listeners a stunning "you are there" time capsule, wrapped in elegant prose. Charles Pellegrino's scientific authority and close relationship with the A-bomb survivors make his account the most gripping and authoritative ever written.
-
-
The Pica-Don
- By Tad Davis on 09-07-20
-
The Life of Robert E. Lee
- By: Mary L. Williamson
- Narrated by: Lloyd James
- Length: 2 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In preparing the Life of Lee for Children, for use in the public schools, I beg leave to place before teachers good reasons for employing it as a supplementary reader.
-
-
A contemporary view well worth the read
- By alex on 04-20-22
-
The Diary of a Napoleonic Foot Soldier
- By: Jakob Walter
- Narrated by: Patrick Tull
- Length: 4 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Napoleon’s surrender and retreat from Moscow in 1812 is a pinnacle of military horror. Of the 600,000 men who crossed into Russia in June of 1812, only 25,000 would survive. Jakob Walter, a conscript soldier, was one of those survivors. His observant diary captures the everyday circumstances that soldiers suffered during the campaign.
-
-
An Extraordinary account of Survival during War
- By Neil on 09-03-11
By: Jakob Walter
-
A Year in the South: 1865
- The True Story of Four Ordinary People Who Lived Through the Most Tumultuous Twelve Months in History
- By: Stephen V. Ash
- Narrated by: Neal Ghant, Nicholas Techosky, Jeremy Arthur, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
A slave determined to gain freedom, a widow battling poverty and despair, a man of God grappling with spiritual and worldly troubles, and a former Confederate soldier seeking a new life. They lived in the South during 1865 - a year that saw war, disunion, and slavery give way to peace, reconstruction, and emancipation. Between January and December 1865, these four people witnessed, from very different vantage points, the death of the Old South and the birth of the New South. Civil War historian Stephen V. Ash reconstructs their daily lives, their fears and hopes, and their frustrations and triumphs in vivid detail.
-
-
Excellent audio book
- By Rodney on 10-29-13
By: Stephen V. Ash
-
The Long Way Home
- An American Journey from Ellis Island to the Great War
- By: David Laskin
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The United States has always been a nation of immigrants---never more so than in 1917 when the nation entered the First World War. Of the 2.5 million soldiers who fought with U.S. armed forces in the trenches of France and Belgium, some half a million---nearly one out of every five men---were immigrants. In The Long Way Home, David Laskin, author of the prizewinning history The Children's Blizzard, tells the stories of 12 of these immigrant heroes.
-
-
WWI History
- By Joan on 12-03-12
By: David Laskin
-
Midnight in Broad Daylight
- A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
- By: Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 11 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara - all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest - moved to Hiroshima, their mother's ancestral home. Eager to go back to his own land - America - Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Despite being sent to an internment camp, Harry dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers, Frank and Pierce, became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army.
-
-
A must listen
- By Jon on 02-01-16
-
The Storm of the Century
- Tragedy, Heroism, Survival, and the Epic True Story of America's Deadliest Natural Disaster: The Great Gulf Hurricane of 1900
- By: Al Roker, William Hogeland
- Narrated by: Byron Wagner
- Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
On the afternoon of September 8, 1900, 200-mile-per-hour winds and 15-foot waves slammed into Galveston, the prosperous and growing port city on Texas' Gulf Coast. By dawn the next day, when the storm had passed, the city that had existed just hours before was gone. Shattered, grief-stricken survivors emerged to witness a level of destruction never before seen: 8,000 corpses littered the streets and were buried under the massive wreckage.
-
-
Excellent read
- By Paul on 09-12-15
By: Al Roker, and others
-
Dark Tide
- The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
- By: Stephen Puleo
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.
-
-
Don't Pass it by Because You Don't Like Molasses!
- By Matthew on 08-18-16
By: Stephen Puleo
-
Spain in Our Hearts
- Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
- By: Adam Hochschild
- Narrated by: Henry Strozier
- Length: 15 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America and around the world as volunteers flooded to Spain to help its democratic government fight off a fascist uprising led by Francisco Franco and aided by Hitler and Mussolini. Today we're accustomed to remembering the war through Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Robert Capa's photographs. But Adam Hochschild has discovered some less familiar yet far more compelling characters who reveal the full tragedy and importance of the war.
-
-
Great book very well written and narrated
- By James750 on 05-12-16
By: Adam Hochschild
-
Wicked River
- The Mississippi When It Last Ran Wild
- By: Lee Sandlin Jeff
- Narrated by: Jeff McCarthy
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Acclaimed journalist and author Lee Sandlin delivers a riveting glimpse of a dangerous and colorful place in America’s historical landscape - the Mississippi River of the 19th century. Long before it was dredged into a shipping channel or romanticized into myth, the untamed Mississippi - the lifeblood of communities that rose and fell along its banks - spawned a motley array of pirates and dignitaries, visionaries, and thieves.
-
-
Worth a listen
- By Robert B. Golson on 12-09-10
By: Lee Sandlin Jeff
-
Isaac's Army
- A Story of Courage and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Poland
- By: Matthew Brzezinski
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 16 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Starting as early as 1939, disparate Jewish underground movements coalesced around the shared goal of liberating Poland from Nazi occupation. For the next six years, separately and in concert, they waged a heroic war of resistance against Hitler's war machine that culminated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In Isaac's Army, Matthew Brzezinski delivers the first-ever comprehensive narrative account of that struggle, following a group of dedicated young Jews - some barely out of their teens - whose individual acts of defiance helped rewrite the ending of World War II.
-
-
Starts off slow. Well researched.
- By LifetimeRoad on 09-24-13
-
The State of Jones
- The Small Southern County that Seceded from the Confederacy
- By: John Stauffer, Sally Jenkins
- Narrated by: Don Leslie
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The State of Jones is a true story about the South during the Civil War, the real South. Not the South that has been mythologized in novels and movies, but an authentic, hardscrabble place where poor men were forced to fight a rich man's war for slavery and cotton. In Jones County, Mississippi, a farmer named Newton Knight led his neighbors, white and black alike, in an insurrection against the Confederacy at the height of the Civil War.
-
-
Confederate Insurrection-Rebellion against Rebels
- By W Perry Hall on 02-02-14
By: John Stauffer, and others
Publisher's Summary
With thousands of men off fighting in the Civil War, the government hired women and girls - some as young as 10 - to make millions of rounds of ammunition. Poor immigrant girls and widows paid the price for carelessness at three major arsenals. Many of these workers were killed, blown up and burned beyond recognition.
As Steve Sheinkin did with The Port Chicago 50, Tanya Anderson in Gunpowder Girls tells an amazing war story that finally gives its subjects their due. Hidden history comes alive through primary-source research and engaging narrative.
Gunpowder Girls is a story of child labor and immigrant hopes and the cruel, endless demands of an all-consuming war.
More from the same
Author
What listeners say about Gunpowder Girls
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- SoMisguided.com
- 05-06-17
Fantastic Look at Women & Work
Would you consider the audio edition of Gunpowder Girls to be better than the print version?
I didn't read the print version but the audio edition is fantastic. The narrator's voice is crisp, clear and engaging. There are slight intonations to connote different sections, presumably sidebar material.
Who was your favorite character and why?
This is nonfiction but there are several characters mentioned throughout, some are the foremen or boys who deliver gunpowder but it's really a book about the women and the work they did during the civil war. There are several personal stories and anecdotes throughout. This is not boring history.
Which scene was your favorite?
The descriptions of two of the arsenal explosions are affecting. You can really imagine that you were at the scene. The descriptions are vivid and the author has done a great job of providing not just the facts but the story and context.
Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?
I listened to this in a few long sessions.
Any additional comments?
The quality of the writing and the narration are superb. As a disclaimer, I received a free review copy but it was a book I requested and very much enjoyed.
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story

- lizzie
- 03-16-19
Interesting historical subject
I bought this on a whim as it was a subject I knew little about Interesting from a historical and social point of view I did find the book slightly repetitive because the 3 stories are so similar