Showing results by narrator "Scott Carrico" in All Categories

World History of Warfare covers worldwide military history from ancient times to the present and is designed for college courses. Its principal theme is an exploration of change and continuity, revolution and tradition, in three thousand years of warfare. It teaches students and general listeners how warfare evolved and how that evolution affected human society, with emphasis on major turning points in the conduct of warfare rather than a superficial general history of wars.  

In Harry Potter and Philosophy, 17 philosophical experts unlock some of Hogwarts' secret panels and uncover surprising insights that are enlightening both for wizards and the most discerning muggles. You don't need a diploma in arithmacy, the friendship of a hippogriff, or even a Hogwarts Library card to discover amazing and arcane secrets in the labyrinthine world of Harry Potter.

On the night of March 5, 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd gathered in front of Boston’s Custom House, killing five people. Denounced as an act of unprovoked violence and villainy, the event that came to be known as the Boston Massacre is one of the most familiar incidents in American history, yet one of the least understood.

Scholars and book collectors across the country have long pondered the intended fate of the infamous collection of rare occult books left to rot in the Church of Starry Wisdom in Providence, Rhode Island, after the Starry Wisdom cult dispersed to parts unknown in the late 19th century. The recent shocking discovery of a previously unknown book auction catalogue issued in 1877 offers insight into the myriad mysteries of the cult.

From its beginnings in the northeastern United States in the 1880s, golf has seen its popularity, and its fortunes, wax and wane, affected by politics and economics, reflecting tensions between aristocratic and democratic impulses. The Kingdom of Golf in America traces these ups and downs, ins and outs, in the growth of golf as a community. Moss describes the development of the private club and public course and the impact of wealth and the consumer culture on those who play golf and those who watch.

The Boys of Winter tells the true story of three young American ski champions and their brutal, heroic, and fateful transformation from athletes to infantrymen with the 10th Mountain Division. Charles J. Sanders's fast-paced narrative draws on dozens of interviews and extensive research to trace these boys' lives from childhood to championships and from training at Mount Rainier and in the Colorado Rockies to battles against the Nazis.

The carnival sideshows of the past have left behind a fascinating legacy of mystery and intrigue. The secrets behind such daring feats as fire-eating and sword swallowing and bizarre exhibitions of human oddities as "Alligator Boys" and "Gorilla Girls" still remain, only grudgingly if ever given up by performers and carnival professionals.

Not all will be interested in a book about channeling. After all, there are many channels and mediums already - some of them charge for their services while others do not. However, these people have varying levels of proficiency. Some are really good while others are merely delusional. There are also those who are not really psychics but scammers who take advantage of people's cluelessness of the spirit world.

General George S. Patton Jr. is one of the most successful yet misunderstood figures in American military history. Despite the many books and articles written about him, none considers in depth how his love of history shaped the course of his life. In this thematic biography, Furman Daniel traces Patton’s obsession with history and argues that it informed and contributed to many of his successes, both on and off the battlefield. Most scholars have overlooked this element of Patton’s character, which Daniel argues is essential to understanding the man’s genius.

In Detestable and Wicked Arts, Paul B. Moyer places early New England's battle against black magic in a transatlantic perspective. Moyer provides an accessible and comprehensive examination of witch prosecutions in the Puritan colonies that discusses how their English inhabitants understood the crime of witchcraft, why some people ran a greater risk of being accused of occult misdeeds, and how gender intersected with witch-hunting.

On December 4, 1865, members of the 39th United States Congress walked into the Capitol Building to begin their first session after the end of the Civil War. They understood their responsibility to put the nation back on the path established by the American Founding Fathers. Author Forrest A. Nabors shows that the ultimate goal of the Republican Party, the war, and Reconstruction was the same. This goal was to preserve and advance republicanism as the American founders understood it, against its natural, existential enemy: oligarchy.

In Car Country, Wells rejects the idea that the nation's automotive status quo can be explained as a simple byproduct of an ardent love affair with the automobile. Instead, he takes listeners on a tour of the evolving American landscape, charting the ways that transportation policies and land-use practices have combined to reshape nearly every element of the built environment around the easy movement of automobiles. Wells untangles the complicated relationships between automobiles and the environment, allowing listeners to see the everyday world in a completely new way.

No one knew where Old Man Peterson got his gold, but there was a lot of it. Everyone wanted a share and was willing to kill to get it.

Charles E. Hires and the Drink That Wowed a Nation chronicles the humble origin and meteoric business success of this extraordinary entrepreneur. Author Bill Double uses published interviews, correspondence, newspaper reports, magazine articles, financial data, and a small family archive to tell this story of native ingenuity. Here, the rough-hewn capitalism of the gilded age, the evolution of the neighborhood drugstore, the rise of advertising in creating mass markets, and the emerging temperance movement all come together in a biography that fizzes with entrepreneurial spirit.

The nineteenth century saw the American circus move from a reviled and rejected form of entertainment to the “Greatest Show on Earth.” Circus Life by Micah D. Childress looks at this transition from the perspective of the people who owned and worked in circuses and how they responded to the new incentives that rapid industrialization made possible.

Superman rose from popular culture - comic books, newspaper strips, radio, television, novels, and movies - but people have so embraced the character that he has now become part of folklore. This transition from popular to folk culture signals the importance of Superman to fans and to a larger American populace. Superman's story has become a myth dramatizing identity, morality, and politics. Many studies have examined the ways in which folklore has provided inspiration for other forms of culture, especially literature and cinema. 

Secret Agent X returns! Pulpdom’s premier spy returns via Airship 27 productions Secret Agent X Volume 6 in three new pulse-pounding adventures. "The Man of a Thousand Faces" is confronted with the most threatening challenges to America imaginable. Only his incredible talents as a super spy can overcome each, from destroying a spreading world plague launched from a giant airship to stymieing Nazi subterfuge at a mountain enclave and then having to fight dead men under spell of an evil mystic. All in a days work for the Agent X. 

Derided for its conformity and consumerism, 1950s America paid a price in anxiety. Prosperity existed under the shadow of a mushroom cloud. Optimism wore a Bucky Beaver smile that masked worry over threats at home and abroad. But even dread could not quell the revolutionary changes taking place in virtually every form of mainstream music. Music historian James Wierzbicki sheds light on how the Fifties' pervasive moods affected its sounds.

And a Madman Mumbled: Tales from the Mind of H. David Blalock runs the genre gamut, taking listeners into worlds that will hopefully never exist and through fevered dreams that we only hope are just nightmares. Blalock carefully crafts each and every tale to thrill, excite, involve, and engage. Encounter creatures and stories both strange and familiar, and some even both, in And a Madman Mumbled: Tales from the Mind of H. David Blalock, from Pro Se Productions.

Empire of Vines details the ways would-be gentlemen farmers, ambitious speculators, horticulturalists, and writers of all kinds deployed the animating myths of American wine culture, including the classical myth of Bacchus, the cult of terroir, and the fantasy of pastoral republicanism. Promoted by figures as varied as horticulturalist Andrew Jackson Downing, novelist Charles Chesnutt, railroad baron Leland Stanford, and Cincinnati land speculator Nicholas Longworth.