Birth History

The Forgotten Architect of the Information Age: The Life and Mind of Claude Shannon Long before smartphones, streaming, and artificial intelligence became everyday realities, a quiet genius laid the groundwork for the modern world—and few today know his name. Claude Shannon, the brilliant mind behind information theory, changed how humanity thinks, communicates, and invents. Without his ideas, the digital age would be unimaginable. Yet Shannon never sought fame. He lived a life defined not by ambition, but by curiosity, playfulness, and a relentless drive to understand the unseen patterns...

In 1960 President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to Communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight Communist forces in Laos. While remaining hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States.

Late in AD 937, four armies met in a place called Brunanburh. On one side stood the shield-wall of the expanding kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons. On the other side stood a remarkable alliance of rival kings - at least two from across the sea – who’d come together to destroy them once and for all. The stakes were no less than the survival of the dream that would become England. The armies were massive. The violence, when it began, was enough to shock a violent age.

It was an explosion that reverberated across the country—and into the very heart of early-twentieth-century America. On the morning of October 1, 1910, the walls of the Los Angeles Times Building buckled as a thunderous detonation sent men, machinery, and mortar rocketing into the night air. When at last the wreckage had been sifted and the hospital triage units consulted, twenty-one people were declared dead and dozens more injured. But as it turned out, this was just a prelude to the devastation that was to come.

In the nineteenth century, Russia participated in two "great games": one, pitted the tsar's empire against Britain in Central Asia. The other, saw Russia, China, and Japan vying for domination of the Korean Peninsula. In this eye-opening account, Sheila Miyoshi Jager argues that the contest over Korea, driven both by Korean domestic disputes and by great-power rivalry, set the course for the future of East Asia and the larger global order.

In history class, we’ve been taught that the Great Depression was all about crashing stock markets, snaking breadlines, and ecological disasters. We learned that FDR tried to put it right with the New Deal, but it was only World War II that finally succeeded in revitalizing the American economy. But that’s not the whole story.

In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.

Crystal Fire is a tale of the human factors in technology; the pride and jealousies coupled with scientific and economic aspiration that led to the creation of modern microelectronics and ignited the greatest technological explosion in history.

Kill the Indian, Save the Man. That is the goal of the Dawes Commission, a federal agency. The Commission is charged with destroying the Muscogee-Creek Nation by allotting communally owned tribal lands to individual members. Forced assimilation is the zeitgeist of 1920s Oklahoma. SAM DAVIS is a handsome, roguish, half-breed. He brokers real estate between illiterate Creeks and land-hungry palefaces. Assimilation makes for good business. Oil strikes bring thousands of fortune-seeking whites to Tulsa. Sam's commissions soar against cascading reports of missing and murdered Creeks. When Sam is...

On December 16, 1947, two physicists at Bell Laboratories, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, jabbed two electrodes into a sliver of germanium half an inch long. The electrical power coming out of that piece of germanium was 100 times stronger than what went in. In that moment, the transistor was invented and the information age began. Crystal Fire recounts the story of the transistor team at Bell Labs, led by William Shockley, who shared the Nobel Prize with Bardeen and Brattain.

Is being good the way to heaven? Being religious? Jesus said, “You must be born again.” John Wesley, spiritual forefather of Methodist, Pentecostal, and Holiness churches and the Salvation Army, explains Jesus’ words in this brief classic. One of the standard sermons Wesley required his circuit riders to learn and re-preach, The New Birth shows that religion and morality are good but new life in Jesus is vital. Wesley pulls no punches. But his 18th-century English is hard for most modern readers. As with his best-selling John Wesley’s The Character of a Methodist, David Wentz has ...

When 1919 began, the city of Chicago seemed on the verge of transformation. Modernizers had an audacious, expensive plan to turn the city from a brawling, unglamorous place into "the Metropolis of the World". But just as the dream seemed within reach, pandemonium broke loose and the city’s highest ambitions were suddenly under attack by the same unbridled energies that had given birth to them in the first place.

"I delivered twenty babies in the summer of 1977. I was hardly more than a baby myself, just turned 24 and starting my third year of medical school." So began Mark Sloan's three-decades-long exploration of the wonders and oddities of human childbirth. Pediatrician, husband, and father, the author has attended nearly 3000 births since that long-ago summer, encountering everything from routine deliveries to tense labor-room dramas.

This is the origin story of the airwaves - the foundational technology of the communications age - as told through the 40-year friendship of an entrepreneurial industrialist and a brilliant inventor. David Sarnoff, the head of RCA and equal parts Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, and William Randolph Hearst, was the greatest supporter of his friend, Edwin Armstrong, developer of the first amplifier, the modern radio transmitter, and FM radio.

The Age of Genius explores the eventful intertwining of outward event and inner intellectual life to tell, in all its richness and depth, the story of the 17th century in Europe. It was a time of creativity unparalleled in history before or since, from science to the arts, from philosophy to politics. Acclaimed philosopher and historian A. C. Grayling points to three primary factors that led to the rise of vernacular (popular) languages in philosophy, theology, science, and literature.

No historian has been able to capture so elegantly the factors influencing the formation of the state of Texas. Three-time winner of the Jefferson Davis Award, William C. Davis precisely describes the spirit of the times during this momentous period. The conflicts between Anglo Texans, native Tejanos, and Mexican officials that led to war come to life with invigorating detail.

As late as the 1930s, virtually no drug intended for sickness did any good; doctors could set bones, deliver babies, and offer palliative care. That all changed in less than a generation with the discovery and development of a new category of medicine known as antibiotics. By 1955 the age-old evolutionary relationship between humans and microbes had been transformed, trivializing once-deadly infections.

Patti Eddington always knew she was adopted, and her beloved parents seemed amenable enough to questions—but she never wanted to hurt them by expressing curiosity, so she didn't. The story of her mother cutting off and dying her hair when she was a toddler? She thought it was eccentric and funny, nothing more. When she discovered at fifteen that her birthday wasn't actually her birthday? She believed it when her mother said she'd changed it to protect her from the "nosy old biddies" who might try to discover her identity.

Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose place in history has been overshadowed by the giant figure of Newton, were pioneering scientists within their own right and instrumental in establishing the Royal Society. Although Newton is widely regarded as one of the greatest scientists of all time and the father of the English Scientific Revolution, John and Mary Gribbin uncover the fascinating story of Robert Hooke and Edmond Halley, whose scientific achievements neatly embrace the hundred years or so during which science as we know it became established.

Handsome and charismatic, Albert Hicks had long been known in the dive bars and gin joints of the Five Points, the most dangerous neighborhood in maritime Manhattan. For years, he operated out of the public eye, rambling from crime to crime, working on the water in ships, sleeping in the nickel-a-night flops, drinking in barrooms where rat-baiting and bear-baiting were great entertainments. Rich Cohen tells the story of this notorious underworld figure, from his humble origins to the wild, globe-crossing, bacchanalian crime spree that forged his ruthlessness and his reputation.