Free Cultural Criticism Audiobooks

Listen to Alexis de Tocqueville's great work of political philosophy and history Democracy in America. Published in two volumes (in 1835 and 1840 respectively), the French political thinker Tocqueville wrote about America as a social scientist after his travels there...

The Proposal is a one act comic farce by Anton Chekhov. In Chekhov's Russia, marriage was a means of economic stability for most people.

When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s he found a thriving democracy of a kind he had not seen anywhere else.

Academic Ableism brings together disability studies and institutional critique to recognize the ways that disability is composed in and by higher education and rewrites the spaces, times, and economies of disability in higher education to place disability front and center.

It is the end of the 19th century. Like thousands of others, the Rudkus family has emigrated from Lithuania to America in search of a better life. As they settle into the Packingtown neighborhood of Chicago, they find their dreams are unlikely to be realized.

Next to de Alexis de Tocquville's almost contemporary Democracy in America, Frances Trollope's work may be the most famous (or at least notorious) dissection of manners and morals of the United States.

First published in 1917, The Glugs of Gosh satirizes Australian life at the start of the twentieth century - but the absurdities it catalogs seem just as prevalent at the start of the twenty-first.

In What Prohibition Has Done to America, Fabian Franklin presents a concise but forceful argument against the Eighteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Beginning in 1920, this Amendment prohibited the sale and manufacture of alcoholic beverages in the United States, until it was repealed in 1933.

This is a volume of selected essays by "the great master of reason" Samuel Johnson. The most famous exerpts from The Rambler, The Adventurer and The Idler are included, covering a vast range of topics.

A collection of 13 essays written between 1900 and 1908, published in 1910. The lead essay, "Revolution", outlines how and why London renounced capitalism as a failed social system and declared himself an active participant in the "socialist revolution"...