A Short History of Nearly Everything is Bill Bryson’s quest to find out everything that has happened from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization....

Why are humans seemingly hardwired to worship gold? It is unique amongst metals: it is malleable, it doesn’t tarnish, and it shines like nothing else. Over time it has come to symbolise wealth and status. It can represent goodness and fidelity but also greed and lust....

In The End Is Always Near, Dan Carlin looks at questions and historical events that force us to consider what sounds like fantasy; that we might suffer the same fate that all previous eras did....  

A lively and engaging narrative history showing the common threads in the cultures that gave birth to our own....

The deep-seated origins and wide-reaching lessons of ancient myths built the foundation for our modern legacies....

The author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization....

This historical magnum opus covers 4,000 years of the extraordinary history of the Jews as a people, a culture, and a nation....

The authors devoted five decades to the study of world history and philosophy, culminating in the masterful 11-volume Story of Civilization....

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred.....

What is art? Why do we value images of saints, kings, goddesses, battles, landscapes or cities from eras of history utterly remote from ourselves....

Do Not Disturb is a powerful investigation into a grisly killing that leads to an unravelling of the benign image of Rwanda, a country showered with Western aid while its leaders began a bloody killing spree of their political opponents....

Evolutionary biologist Jared Diamond stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history by revealing the environmental factors actually responsible for history's broadest patterns....

Johannes Krause is the director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and a brilliant pioneer in the field of archaeogenetics - archaeology augmented by DNA sequencing technology - which has allowed scientists to reconstruct human history reaching back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time. In this surprising account, Krause and journalist Thomas Trappe rewrite a fascinating chapter of this history, the peopling of Europe, that takes us from the Neanderthals and Denisovans to the present. 

This thorough guide explores those civilizations that have faded from the pages of our textbooks but played a significant role in the development of modern society. Forgotten Peoples of the Ancient World covers the Hyksos to the Hephthalites and everyone in between, providing a unique overview of humanity's history from approximately 3000 BCE-550 CE. Each entry exposes a diverse culture, highlighting their important contributions. 

In the course of several years as a resident at an artist colony in a town in southern France, the author learns of the hidden role that many of the area's citizens played in heroic efforts to rescue Jews from the Nazi-held territory in World War II, and this knowledge in turn informs her own rediscovery of her Jewish heritage, denied her as a child. 

Beginning with the Continental Navy, Small Boats and Daring Men traces maritime missions through the wars of the early republic, from the coast of modern-day Libya to the rivers and inlets of the Chesapeake Bay. Armstrong brings a uniquely informed perspective to his subject; and his work is at once an exciting narrative of danger and combat at sea and a thoroughgoing analysis of how these events fit into concepts of American sea power.

Blending history, science, and culture, a stunning and highly engaging evolutionary story exploring how walking on two legs allowed humans to become the planet’s dominant species.

This is a wonderful history of books and how they evolved over time. Very listenable and not dense. It provides the listener with a great arc of how we moved from clay tablets to illuminated texts to movable type to the modern era.