Europe America

Americans have long been fascinated by the Civil War, marveling at the size of the battles, the leadership of the generals, and the courage of the soldiers. Since the war's start over 150 years ago, the events have been subjected to endless debate among historians and the generals themselves. The Civil War was the deadliest conflict in American history, and had the two sides realized it would take four years and inflict over a million casualties, it might not have been fought.

The Marquis de Lafayette: The Life and Legacy of the American Revolution’s Most Famous Foreign Soldier profiles one of the Revolutionary War’s most important figures. You will learn about Lafayette like never before.

Many ancient civilizations have influenced and inspired people in the 21st century, and the Greeks and Romans continue to fascinate the West today, but of all the world’s civilizations, none have intrigued people more than the Mayans, whose culture, astronomy, language, and mysterious disappearance all continue to captivate people. In the past decade especially, there has been a renewed focus on the Mayans, whose advanced calendar led many to speculate the world would end on the same date the Mayan calendar ended in 2012.

The first successful American colony in North America was settled in 1607 at Jamestown, Virginia. Though the Virginian colonists had difficulty in the beginning, by the late 1620s the Chesapeake area was thriving, having become a haven for those seeking economic opportunity in the new world.

Oscar Wilde visited America in the year 1882. Interest in the Aesthetic School, of which Wilde was the most prominent representative, had spread to the United States, and Wilde decided to undertake an American lecture tour to explain the Aesthetic movement. Towards the end of September 1883 Wilde returned to England and immediately commenced a lecturing tour. His first visit was to Wandsworth Town Hall where he presented his "Impressions of America", the text of which was published in 1906.

While the battle had a profound impact, it has also been romanticized and mythologized beyond even epic proportions. Though often forgotten today (more than 250 years after the battle), the Battle of the Plains of Abraham was the culmination of a long siege, and the decisive action itself was an incredibly short affair at less than half an hour. Despite that brevity, both commanding generals were mortally wounded in the exchange, making British General James Wolfe a national hero on both sides of the Atlantic and French General Louis-Joseph de Montcalm a convenient scapegoat.

This is the second in a series of audiobooks about Spain's assistance to the US during the American Revolutionary War.

World War II stood apart in many ways from every earlier war, not least in the way that it reached to every corner of the planet and involved a noticeable segment of humanity's collective resources. Battles erupted not only on land and the sea's surface as they had for centuries, but also in the ocean depths and the windswept heights of the sky. One of the war's most crucial struggles happened in the realm of the unseen, inside the human mind and amid the invisible flow of radio waves.

The Oak Island Enigma is a gripping history of the mystery of Oak Island and its "Money Pit". It details the early discoveries: the shaft with its platforms, the drainage tunnels from the ocean that fill the shaft with sea water, the many attempts to find what the construction hides and protects.

Standing in history like a milestone marking the boundary between one era and the next, the Potsdam Conference brought together the leaders of the three major Allied powers - the United States, the Soviet Union, and the United Kingdom - for the last time at the end of World War II and at the threshold of the Cold War. A follow up to the Yalta Conference just five months earlier, Potsdam attempted to work out the contours of the postwar world.

From the onset of the war, Basil L. Gildersleeve, native of Charleston, South Carolina, a scholar, and professor of Greek at the University of Virginia left his students every Spring to return to the army until he was wounded during a skirmish in the Shenadoah Valley in 1864. Thirty years later he authored The Creed of the Old South, and A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War included in this audiobook.

Irish contributions to American life from corned beef and cabbage to submarines: These are just a few of the wonderful things that make America the warm-hearted, good-humored, flag-waving country that it has been for 250 years, and they all came from the grand green land of Ireland. Since Patrick Maguire stepped off the decks of Columbus’ Santa Maria ship in 1492 to drag his dinghy onto the shores of San Salvador, the Irish have had one foot in the muddy black soil and brilliant green grass of Ireland and one on the mountains and lakes and prairies of the Land of the Free.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans as well as original use of manuscript atlases, paintings that depict European representations of nature, and texts that circulated across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions.

Cabeza de Vaca's mode of transportation, afoot on portions of two continents in the early decades of the 16th century, fits one dictionary definition of the word "pedestrian". By no means, however, should the ancillary meanings of "commonplace" or "prosaic" be applied to the man or his remarkable adventures. Between 1528 and 1536, he trekked an estimated 2480 to 2640 miles of North American terrain from the Texas coast near Galveston Island to San Miguel de Culiacán near the Pacific Coast of Mexico.

No one expected that the American colonies might seriously consider fighting their British masters until the infamous Boston massacre of March 1770. On 26 October 1775, George III, King of Great Britain, spoke to Parliament, declaring the American colonies to be in a state of rebellion. Here, for the first time, the use of force was authorized against the rebels.

The West is home to the world's oldest and democracies, and though these democratic governments take many different forms, from America's republican system to Britain's parliamentary system, every democracy and the principles behind it have their origins in the Magna Carta.

A principios del siglo XVI, los aventureros españoles invadieron las islas del Caribe, México, Centroamérica y Sudamérica. Los exploradores y mercaderes portugueses se adentraron en el océano Índico y llegaron hasta las islas de las Especias del Pacífico Sur. Los nombres de los líderes de estas conquistas ultramarinas son bastante conocidos: Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, Afonso de Albuquerque y Fernando de Magallanes. Lo que este libro explora son los detalles de sus increíbles vidas al servicio de sus monarcas y de su riqueza personal.

De entre todos los conflictos acaecidos en la historia de América, la guerra de 1812 es uno de los más singulares, y clave en el devenir americano. Fue una batalla llena de sorpresas e ironías - las debilidades de ambas partes en el conflicto a lo largo de los dos años de lucha constante terminarían por convertirse en sus respectivas fortalezas.

Considered by some to be far too old for one attempting to rejuvenate the career of a soldier, Baron Johann von de Kalb was a keen student of war with a steady mind and hand. Once able to prove his worth to the Continental Congress, he rose immediately to the rank of brigadier general under George Washington, served with distinction, and died heroically in the Battle of Camden, a battle in the South that foretold the eventual surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown.

In the Age of Exploration, the British began building an enormous and highly profitable foreign empire. While the British Empire initially lagged behind other European powers such as Spain and Portugal, it still managed to colonize the New World and discover highly-lucrative trade routes.