Early History

When Jesus sent 70 disciples on ahead of him, part of their mission was to heal the sick. In fact, they were supposed to heal the sick before they preached the Gospel. Best-selling author Mike Aquilina calls this command the healing imperative. And it's an imperative that ushered in the world of modern medicine. In The Healing Imperative: The Early Church and the Invention of Medicine as We Know It, Aquilina reconstructs the fascinating history of a uniquely Christian institution: the hospital.

Did you know that Christianity has gone through many changes since its origin? Over two thousand years ago, a Jewish man was born into a society in turmoil. It is impossible to tell the story of Christianity without understanding the man behind it. What were the lives of Jesus and his followers like? How were their words so impactful that they changed history and affected the lives of billions of people over the course of two thousand years?

A land of almost 3 million square miles has lain since time immemorial on the southern flank of the planet, so isolated that it remained entirely outside of European knowledge until 1770. However, the first human footprints on this vast territory were felt 70,000 years earlier. The history of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia is a complex. For generations after the arrival of whites in Australia, the Aboriginal people were disregarded and marginalized, largely because they offered little in the way of a labor resource, and they occupied land required for European settlement.

Before Civil War greenbacks and a national bank network established a uniform federal currency in the United States, the proliferation of loosely regulated banks saturated the early American republic with upward of 10,000 unique and legal bank notes. In Bank Notes and Shinplasters, Joshua R. Greenberg shows how ordinary Americans accumulated and wielded the financial knowledge required to navigate interpersonal bank note transactions.

Over 1,100 years before William the Conqueror became the King of England after the Battle of Hastings, Julius Caesar came, saw, and conquered part of “Britannia”, setting up a Roman province with a puppet king in 54 BCE. In the new province, the Romans eventually constructed a military outpost overlooking a bridge across the River Thames. The new outpost was named Londinium, and it covered just over two dozen acres. By the second century CE, Londinium was a large Roman city, with tens of thousands of inhabitants using villas, palaces, a forum, temples, and baths.

The bubonic plague was the worst affliction ever visited upon Europe and the Mediterranean world. Within a few short years, a quarter of the population was taken after a short but torturous illness. Those who escaped faced famine and economic hardship. Crops were left unsown; the harvests spoiled for lack of harvesters; villages, towns, and great cities were depopulated. Markets were destroyed; and trade ground to a halt. It must have seemed like the end of the world to the terrified populace.

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies.

One of the most important and memorable events of the United States’ westward push across the frontier came with the discovery of gold in the lands that became California in January 1848. Located thousands of miles away from the country’s power centers on the East Coast at the time, the announcement came a month before the Mexican-American War had ended.

The Sino-Japanese Wars: The History and Legacy of the Early 20th Century Conflicts That Made Japan the Dominant Power in Asia examines what brought about the wars, the most notorious events, and the important aftermath.

By the mid-17th century, the existence of a land in the south referred to as Terra Australis was generally known and understood by the Europeans, and incrementally, its shores were observed and mapped. Van Diemen’s Land, an island off the south coast of Australia now called Tasmania, was identified in 1642 by Dutch mariner Abel Tasman, and a few months later, the intrepid Dutchman would add New Zealand to the map of the known world.

Over the centuries, the West has become fascinated by the Vikings, one of the most mysterious and interesting European civilizations. In addition to being perceived as a remarkably unique culture among its European counterparts, what’s known and not known about the Vikings’ accomplishments has added an intriguing aura to the historical narrative. Were they fierce and fearsome warriors? Were they the first Europeans to visit North America? It seems some of the legends are true, and some are just that, legend.

Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots delineates the differences between the British and Portuguese empires as they struggled with revolutionary tumult. It reveals how those differences led to turbulent transnational exchanges between the United States and Brazil as merchants, smugglers, rogue officials, slave traders, and pirates sought to trade outside legal confines.

Between 1800 and 1920, an extraordinary cast of bold innovators and entrepreneurs - individuals such as Cyrus McCormick, Brigham Young, Henry Wells and James Fargo, Fred Harvey, Levi Strauss, Adolph Coors, J. P. Morgan, and Buffalo Bill Cody - helped lay the groundwork for what we now call the American West. They were people of imagination and courage, adept at maneuvering the rapids of change, alert to opportunity, persistent in their missions.

Grab your investigative tools, and get ready to meet the Inca people. They were the biggest civilization in the Americas during their time, so how did they fall so quickly to the Spanish conquistadors? Dive into this audiobook to learn more about the Inca Empire in a fun, up-to-date journey through its history.

Most Americans have heard of the Little Bighorn, the 1876 battle in which a band of Lakota Sioux and their allies wiped out most of the 7th US Cavalry under the command of George Armstrong Custer. The movie images are of fierce warriors in long eagle feather headdresses flowing behind them as they gallop across the plains on nimble Indian ponies.

FNH Audio presents an unabridged reading of this WWI naval history by an author who actually took part in the battle(s) described. This plain, unvarnished account, so far as is known, is the first attempt that has been made to link with the description of the Battle of the Falkland Islands, fought on December 8th 1914, to the events leading up to that engagement. Each phase presented has been read and approved by officers who participated.

That Jesus of Nazareth was crucified is the closest to a historical fact anyone can say about him. Biblical scholars have spent centuries debating the details of what Jesus did and said, but this crude fact—that Jesus suffered capital punishment at the hands of the Roman authority by crucifixion—is accepted by the overwhelming majority of scholars. That there once was a cross where Jesus suffered and died is, therefore, the sequential logical affirmation.

In Faithful Witness, Phil Baker explains the theology of martyrdom that developed over the first 300 years of Christianity, and why that theology proved so powerful in the early years of the faith. Why did they choose faithfulness over fear? Why did they choose dying over killing? Why did they choose self-sacrifice over revenge? Why did they have such peace and joy in the midst of unimaginable torture? By AD 313, why had roughly 10 percent of the Roman Empire’s population embraced Christianity, when it was both illegal and incredibly dangerous to do so?

Meet Dug, a scrawny but cheerful caveman who loves his valley and just wants the best for his tribe of misfits. Accompanied by his faithful pig sidekick Hognob, Dug is a dreamer - why settle for hunting rabbits when you can hunt a mammoth?! Then there’s Dug’s tribe, led by the cautious Chief Bobnar. Bobnar wants the best for the tribe, too, but he sees things a little differently from Dug. Then Dug meets the evil Lord Nooth. He’s the leader of the Bronze Age City invading the valley.

Join this great voyage through the history of the Panama Canal, which is, one hundred years after its completion, on the eve of a new chapter in its spectacular history. From the early explorers, many seeking a critical water connection between two of the world's great oceans to the determination of the best engineers of America, the BIG DIG finally opened for shipping - you can be on board! What stood in the way of making this canal a reality?