History Ages

The early modern era in Europe set the mold for the Western world today. It was a complex, tragic, yet pivotal time. It marked the transition between the dominance of the Catholic church throughout Western Europe and the present age of science, reason, and skepticism. The path through this transition was an exciting yet bloody and sorrowful one. The wars between Catholics and Protestants in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rivaled those of the present in cruelty and atrocity. Durant takes us through the religious wars between Catholics and Protestants in France.

David Quammen's book, The Song of the Dodo, is a brilliant, stirring work, breathtaking in its scope, far-reaching in its message - a crucial book in precarious times, which radically alters the way in which we understand the natural world and our place in that world. It's also a book full of entertainment and wonders. In The Song of the Dodo, we follow Quammen's keen intellect through the ideas, theories, and experiments of prominent naturalists of the last two centuries.

Stretching 80 miles from coast to coast across northern England, Hadrian's Wall is the largest Roman artifact known today. It is commonly viewed as a defiant barrier, the end of the empire, a place where civilization stopped and barbarism began. In fact, the massive structure remains shrouded in mystery. Was the wall intended to keep out the Picts, who inhabited the North? Or was it merely a symbol of Roman power and wealth? What was life like for soldiers stationed along its expanse? How was the extraordinary structure built - with what technology, skills, and materials?

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Age of Discovery, then pay attention.... The Age of Discovery began in the early part of the 15th century and carried on through most of the 17th century. It is sometimes also referred to as the Age of Exploration. This was a time when the people of Europe began to travel, discover, and explore more of the world than ever before, mapping and naming the places they found. They bravely went out on the seas to learn about the world, often never sure if they would find anything at all, let alone ever return home.

In 2018, scientists manipulated the DNA of human babies for the first time. As biologist and historian Matthew Cobb shows in As Gods, this achievement was one many scientists have feared from the start of the genetic age. Four times in the last fifty years, geneticists, frightened by their own technology, have called a temporary halt to their experiments. They ought to be frightened.

The Renaissance and Reformation were exciting times of learning and discovery – they pushed the boundaries of accepted thought. The repercussions of this, however, were that they left in their wake a period of universal uncertainty. The centuries-old status quo had been turned on its head. Nothing was stable anymore. Conflict ensued. The fourth volume of 2,000 Years of Christ's Power spans from the 16th to the 18th century.

Ancient China collides with newfangled America in this epic tale of opium smugglers, sea pirates, and dueling clipper ships. Brilliantly illuminating one of the least-understood areas of American history, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolin now traces our fraught relationship with China back to its roots: the unforgiving nineteenth-century seas that separated a brash, rising naval power from a battered ancient empire. It is a prescient fable for our time, one that surprisingly continues to shed light on our modern relationship with China.

Meet the man who changed the course of history. Ibn Sina for Beginners: The Man Who Bridged Medicine and Metaphysics brings you face-to-face with a mind so powerful that it redefined the boundaries of science and philosophy. This book isn’t just an introduction; it’s an invitation to explore the genius of a thinker who dared to connect the dots between the physical and the metaphysical. Uncover the secrets behind Ibn Sina’s revolutionary Canon of Medicine, a work that shaped medical practice for centuries and remains a cornerstone in the history of healthcare. Learn how his approach ...

In 1517, the Ottoman Sultan Selim "the Grim" conquered Egypt and brought his empire for the first time in history into direct contact with the trading world of the Indian Ocean. During the decades that followed, the Ottomans became progressively more engaged in the affairs of this vast and previously unfamiliar region, eventually to the point of launching a systematic ideological, military and commercial challenge to the Portuguese Empire, their main rival for control of the lucrative trade routes of maritime Asia.

Philosophy has often seemed like the castor oil of the disciplines: healthy, but never pleasurable, and best when swallowed quickly and forgotten. Will Durant’s classic The Story of Philosophy is a welcome remedy for this misconception, and—in view of the fact that it is nearly 100 years old—a remarkably refreshing one. This deluxe edition includes The Age of Faith, the fourth volume in the great series, The Story of Civilization. It covers the years 1095—the launching of the First Crusade—and 1300.

In Volume 4, Hume closes his account of ‘England Under the House of Tudor' begun in Volume 3, and devotes it entirely to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. It was not really expected that she would survive to accede to the monarchy; and it was certainly unexpected that she would rule for so long (1558-1603) while steadfastly declining to take a husband. All in all, her reign was a remarkable achievement. Elizabeth had so much to contend with over the years. From the start, she had to oversee the reinstatement of the Protestant religion after the tumultuous reign of her sister, Mary.

The ancient Greeks gave us so much that we still use today; mythological stories we continue to study in schools and colleges and the Olympics are just a few. While Greece is just a small European country today, it covered parts of today’s North Africa and Iran - and had a society much like ours. Greeks enjoyed great food, music, and reading. Society was governed a lot like modern times, and its people were farmers, politicians, artists, and inventors! Prepare to be amazed about how this ancient society looks so much like our own - and why.

The battle of Crécy in 1346 is one of the most famous and widely studied military engagements in history. The repercussions of this battle were felt for hundreds of years, and the exploits of those fighting reached the status of legend. Yet cutting-edge research has shown that nearly everything that has been written about this dramatic event may be wrong. In this new study, Michael Livingston reveals how modern scholars have used archived manuscripts, satellite technologies and traditional fieldwork to help unlock what was arguably the battle’s greatest secret.

Thomas Cahill tells the story of how Europe evolved from the classical age of Rome to the medieval era. Without Ireland, the transition could not have taken place. Not only did Irish monks and scribes maintain the very record of Western civilization, they brought their uniquely Irish world-view to the task. As Cahill delightfully illustrates, so much of the liveliness we associate with medieval culture has its roots in Ireland. When the seeds of culture were replanted on the European continent, it was from Ireland that they were germinated.

A born teacher and lecturer, Professor Timothy B. Shutt examines the history and culture of ancient Sparta, a society renowned for military excellence and adherence to the values of courage, discipline, duty, and the overcoming of fear. Vastly outnumbered at the Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan "300" held off an overwhelming Persian force before finally succumbing - but not without inflicting massive casualties and inspiring the rest of the Greeks with the notion that they could persevere.

After the long period of cultural decline known as the Dark Ages, Europe experienced a rebirth of scholarship, art, literature, philosophy, and science, and began to develop a vision of Western society that remains at the heart of Western civilization today.

The story of the men and women who drove the Voyager spacecraft mission, told by a scientist who was there from the beginning. The Voyager spacecraft are our farthest-flung emissaries--11.3 billion miles away from the crew who built and still operate them decades after their launch.

Our understanding of the Persian Empire has traditionally come from the histories of Greek writers such as Herodotus—and as such, over many centuries, our perspective has been skewed by ancient political and cultural agendas. Professor Llewellyn-Jones, however, calls upon original Achaemenid sources, including inscriptions, art and recent archaeological discoveries in Iran, to create an authentic 'Persian Version' of this remarkable first great empire of antiquity—the Age of the Great Kings.

An ordinary Utah college student named Reggie Shaw fatally strikes two rocket scientists while texting and driving. Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Matt Richtel follows Reggie from the moment of the tragedy, through the police investigation, the state's groundbreaking prosecution, and ultimately, Reggie's wrenching admission of responsibility. Richtel parallels Reggie's journey with leading-edge scientific findings regarding human attention and the impact of technology on our brains.

More than 12,000 years ago, in one of the greatest triumphs of prehistory, humans colonized North America, a continent that was then truly a new world. Just when and how they did so has been one of the most perplexing and controversial questions in archaeology.