History Ages

All too frequently leadership is reduced to a simple dichotomy: the strong versus the weak. Yet there are myriad ways to exercise effective political leadership - as well as different ways to fail. We blame our leaders for economic downfalls and praise them for vital social reforms, but rarely do we question what makes some leaders successful while others falter.

In the mid-1960s, Betty and Barney Hill became famous as the first Americans to claim that aliens had taken them aboard a spacecraft against their will. Their story—involving a lonely highway late at night, lost memories, and medical examinations by small gray creatures with large eyes—has become the template for nearly every encounter with aliens in American popular culture since.

In 2000, archaeologist Paul Gething rediscovered a sword. An unprepossessing length of rusty metal, it had been left in a suitcase for thirty years. But Paul had a suspicion that the sword had more to tell than appeared, so he sent it for specialist tests. When the results came back, he realized that what he had in his possession was possibly the finest, and certainly the most complex, sword ever made, which had been forged in seventh-century Northumberland by an anonymous swordsmith.

In this book, you'll learn how: data science, driven by artificial intelligence and machine learning, is yielding unprecedented business insights; blockchain has the potential to restructure the economy; drones and driverless vehicles are becoming essential tools; 3-D printing is making new business models possible; augmented reality is transforming retail and manufacturing; smart speakers are redefining the rules of marketing; and humans and machines are working together to reach new levels of productivity.

Author Anne Rooney brings together the threads that have made up psychology, from the musings of the Ancient Greeks to the findings of functional MRI scanning. The Story of Psychology is a narrative of how we have tried to approach the very core of our being—of what makes us ourselves.

Declaring the church corrupt and urging rationality over revelation, Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason directly opposed the existing political and religious order of his time. Initially printed in pamphlet form, his work audaciously employed “vulgar” everyday language, as Paine sought to bring his message, and the appeal of deism, to the masses.

The Hittites are an ancient people who remain somewhat enigmatic, but their influence on the ancient Near East is undeniable. From high in their capital of Hattusa in central Anatolia, the Hittites were able to conquer and control a kingdom that roughly comprised the area of modern Turkey, Syria, and parts of Iraq and Lebanon through a combination of brute military force and shrewd diplomatic machinations.

From the 15th to the mid-19th centuries, scurvy caused more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks, combat, and all other diseases combined. The cure for scurvy ranks among the greatest of military successes, yet its impact on history has mostly been ignored. In this book, Stephen R. Brown delivers a lively recounting of how three determined individuals overcame the constraints of 18th century thinking to solve the greatest medical mystery of their era. Brimming with tales of ships, sailors, and bureaucracy, Brown presents a vivid picture of life aboard the ship during the age of sail.

This audiobook is perfect if you love history or just want to know more cool facts. It’s like a time machine that takes you back to amazing times in history! With 1500 interesting facts bringing history to life, you’ll see the past in a whole new way.

William Shakespeare may have been the greatest playwright in the English language, but how does he measure up as a historian? In this brilliant comparison between the events and characters in Shakespeare's history plays and the actual events that inspired them, acclaimed historian John Julius Norwich examines the nine works that together amount to an epic masterpiece on England's most fascinating period.

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.

Revealed for the first time in Racing for the Bomb, Groves played a crucial and decisive role in the planning, timing, and targeting of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions. Norris offers new insights into the complex and controversial questions surrounding the decision to drop the bomb in Japan and Groves' actions during World War II, which had a lasting imprint on the nuclear age and the Cold War that followed.

The fifteenth book of The Richard Jackson Saga has Rick exploring the moon and outer space. Danger, fame and fortune, and adventure seem to be his lot in life. He connects with the love of his life. His actions have caused a change in history as we know it. He and Russia have their final confrontation. Then there is the moon and the outer reaches to explore.

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful "history from below." Scott follows the spread of "rumors of emancipation" and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.

Many have heard the term “Balkans” tossed about but likely don’t know a whole lot about the region. The saga of the Balkans is profound yet incredibly complicated. Bordered by both the Balkan Mountains of southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, this region holds a strong place in the history of Western civilization and is also a major crossroads of Eastern civilization as well.

He came. He saw. He conquered. Julius Caesar was a force to be reckoned with as a savvy politician, an impressive orator, and a brave soldier. Born in Rome in 100 BC, he quickly climbed the ladder of Roman politics, making allies - and enemies - along the way. His victories in battle awarded him the support of the people, but flush from power, he named himself dictator for life. The good times, however, would not last much longer. On the Ides of March, Caesar was brutally assassinated by a group of senators determined to end his tyranny, bringing his reign to an end.

The future is now. Artificial "machine" intelligence is playing an ever-greater role in our society. We are already using cruise control in our cars and automatic checkout at the drugstore and are unable to live without our smartphones. The discussion around AI is largely polarized; people think either machines will solve all problems for everyone or they will lead us down a dark, dystopian path into total human irrelevance. Regardless of what you believe, the idea that we might bring forth intelligent creation can be intrinsically frightening.

This audiobook exposes the misconceptions, half-truths, and outright lies that have shaped the still dominant but largely mythical version of what happened in the White House during those harrowing two weeks of secret Cuban missile crisis deliberations. A half-century after the event it is surely time to demonstrate, once and for all, that RFK's Thirteen Days and the personal memoirs of other ExComm members cannot be taken seriously.

Aegis’s battle against Damocles ended with the Shield of Justice presumed dead and the President of the United States in a coma. As Aegis's friends and allies cope with this devastating loss, a new authoritarian regime rises to brand all superheroes as public enemies. In truth, Hugo Malalou (Aegis) is now a stranger in a strange and dangerous land, living someone else’s life. He has to find his way home in time to stop this sinister regime’s plan to wipe out all superhumans. With the fate of the country and his peers on his shoulders, Hugo cannot afford to fail.

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.