World

Amoral, cunning, ruthless, and instructive, this piercing work distills 3,000 years of the history of power into 48 well-explicated laws....

Focused on those directly affected by the tragedy, The Gales of November is both an emotional tribute to the lives lost and a propulsive, thrilling narrative history of America’s most-mourned maritime disaster.

The Viking Age - from 750 to 1050 saw an unprecedented expansion of the Scandinavian peoples into the wider world. As traders and raiders, explorers and colonists, they ranged from eastern North America to the Asian steppe....

"A treasure trove of myths and terror… Atmospheric as hell… Immersive."-The Times Based on the podcast with over one hundred million downloads, Fall of Civilizations brilliantly explores how a range of ancient societies rose to power and sophistication, and how they tipped over into collapse...

#1 New York Times Bestseller New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21st Century The Summer Reading Pick for President Barack Obama and Bill Gates Official U.S. edition From renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari comes a groundbreaking narrative of humanity’s creation and...

A narrative history of how Attila, Genghis Khan and the so-called barbarians of the steppes shaped world civilization. The barbarian nomads of the Eurasian steppes have played a decisive role in world history, but their achievements have gone largely unnoticed. These nomadic tribes have produced...

All the makings of your favorite adventure story—drama, intrigue, promise, love, hope, and heartache spanning two thousand years . . . and YOU are a part of it!

Thousands of years ago, in a part of the world we now call ancient Mesopotamia, people began writing things down for the very first time. What they left behind, in a vast region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, preserves leaps in human ingenuity.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager, showing that it...

THE #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER One of the world’s most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body takes his ultimate journey—into the most intriguing and intractable questions that science seeks to answer. “Brims with strange and amazing facts...

This sweeping history of the often-violent conflict between Islam and the West sheds a revealing light on current hostilities....

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs and Steel examines the rise of civilization and the issues its development has raised throughout history. Having done field work in New Guinea for more than 30 years, Jared Diamond presents the geographical and ecological factors that have shaped...

From his perspective in Renaissance Italy, Machiavelli's aim in this classic work was to resolve conflict with the ruling prince, Lorenzo de Medici....

Canada’s greatest modern-day explorer sets out into the arctic wilderness to solve a mystery more than 100 years old. In November 1910, explorer Hubert Darrell vanished in the uncharted wilds of the Northwest Territories. A prospector who had been swept up in the Klondike Gold Rush, Darrell...

In August of 1914, the British ship Endurance set sail for the South Atlantic. In October 1915, still half a continent away from its intended base, the ship was trapped, then crushed in the ice

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the author of Sapiens comes the groundbreaking story of how information networks have made, and unmade, our world. “Strikingly original . . . A historian whose arguments operate on the scale of millennia has managed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly...

This audiobook narrated by acclaimed archaeologist and best-selling author Eric Cline offers a breathtaking account of how the collapse of an ancient civilized world ushered in the first Dark Ages....

When Autobiography of a Yogi first appeared in 1946, it was acclaimed as a landmark work in its field....

Yuval Noah Harari, author of the critically-acclaimed New York Times bestseller and international phenomenon Sapiens, returns with an equally original, compelling, and provocative book, turning his focus toward humanity’s future, and our quest to upgrade humans into gods. Over the past century...

The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400....

An extraordinary account of how the Christian Revolution forged the Western imagination “A galloping tour of Christianity’s influence across the last 2,000 years.” —New York Times Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How...

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style....

"An all-encompassing treatise on modern civilization, offering bold revisions to canonical understandings in sociology, anthropology, archaeology and political philosophy that led to where we are today."—The New York Times A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the definitive book on Lewis and Clark’s exploration of the Louisiana Purchase, the most momentous expedition in American history and one of the great adventure stories of all time. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson...

The sea is the largest museum on earth, with more than a million lost ships resting in its depths. Those shipwrecks date back thousands of years, some from civilizations long vanished, others from more recent history. Some are famous, others obscure and unremembered but each has a story to tell.

In The Cultural Tutor’s Grand Tour, the ephemera of the everyday opens up to reveal a world of high art and low cunning - where a love affair can trigger a World War, a lamp-post can birth a cathedral, and a cup of coffee can take you on a journey of a thousand years. In the 18th Century, young English gentlemen would embark on Grand Tours - educational journeys to foreign climes, absorbing the sights, sounds and stories that defined them. But we get it - you’re busy. These days, all you need to see the world is a pair of headphones.

The Four Heavens brings to life the cultural and visual splendor of the ancient Maya, drawing on the oldest indigenous texts of the Americas and the latest archaeological discoveries to present an entirely new history of this spectacular civilization. Renowned historian and archaeologist David Stuart, who has made groundbreaking contributions to the decipherment of Maya hieroglyphics, shows how there was no single rise and fall of the Maya but a series of births and collapses over a breathtaking span of nearly three millennia.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, acclaimed historian of Gaza, is intimately familiar with the land's people and places; he speaks the local dialect. But nothing prepared him for what he encountered there in December 2024. This is his unforgettable, unbearably intimate account of one month in a place shattered by Israel's all-out war.

Although the Counter-Reformation is sometimes also called the Catholic Reformation, the latter term properly refers to the set of measures of spiritual, theological and liturgical renewal with which the Catholic Church had attempted to reform its institutions even before the Council of Trent. During the Council of Constance, for example, the council fathers had already called for a reform "in the head and in the members", but it was only after the Protestant Reformation that this need became urgent, resulting in the application of the Tridentine conciliar provisions.

A política internacional está em constante movimento. Diariamente, somos testemunhas de guerras, crises, conflitos, eleições e golpes, o que pode nos fazer acreditar em um mundo imerso no caos. No entanto, esse aparente desordem esconde uma ordem subjacente e estruturada. Este curso desvenda as origens históricas da política internacional contemporânea, revelando como eventos passados moldaram a dinâmica global que conhecemos hoje.

From the Great Pyramid to the Tunguska Explosion, from Atlantis to Area 51—100 enigmas that still defy explanation. What did the builders of Stonehenge know that we've forgotten? Why were the Nazca Lines drawn on a scale only visible from the sky? How did ancient civilizations cut, transport, and place stones so massive and precise that modern engineers struggle to replicate the feat? The Little Black Book of Ancient Mysteries is a guided tour through 100 of history's most enduring puzzles—monuments whose construction defies conventional explanation, manuscripts no one can read, ...

Japan's blissful isolation changed with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. In awe of the American weapons and ships, the Tokugawa shogunate quickly realized that they needed to evolve and modernize their military to survive, and a time of rapid change descended on Japan. Within a mere 30 years, the Tokugawa period’s great samurai caste was extinct. Military service was no longer the exclusive domain of the privileged warrior class who had combined the military with an intricate network of social status and vassalship to their feudal lords.

Though extremely different men in most ways, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Third Reich Fuhrer Adolf Hitler shared a passion for science, technology, and (sometimes impractical) "wonder weapons." In some cases, this fixation paid off handsomely, as in the case of British centrimetric radar, a compact, powerful radar type that enabled fitment to individual aircraft and contributed to the defeat of German U-boats.

Every drink tells a story. Some of them changed the world. Beer built the first cities. Tea triggered two wars and reshaped an empire. Rum was inseparable from the slave trade—and from the American Revolution. Champagne became humanity's universal signal that a moment deserves to be remembered. And Coca-Cola? It became the most recognized commercial brand in history, embraced and resisted by nations with the intensity reserved for things that truly matter. 50 Drinks That Changed the World takes you inside the stories behind civilization's most consequential beverages—from the ancient ...

Every spice in your kitchen has a secret. Most of them involve war. Black pepper paid the ransom for a Roman city. Nutmeg drove a company to genocide. Vanilla was locked inside a single country for three centuries until a twelve-year-old enslaved boy discovered how to set it free. Saffron was guarded so jealously that adulterating it was punishable by death. 50 Spices That Shaped History takes you inside the stories behind civilization's most coveted flavors — from the ancient trade routes that made fortunes and broke empires, to the kitchens where the world's cuisines were transformed by...

What if everything you thought you knew about race, geography, and human history was incomplete? For centuries, the world has been taught a simple narrative: Blackness belongs to Africa. Asia and the Middle East are something else. But history tells a different story. Across the forests of Southeast Asia, the deserts of Arabia, the coasts of India, and the islands of the Pacific live black populations whose presence challenges everything we think we know. They are dark-skinned. They are ancient. They are indigenous. And yet—they have been overlooked. Hidden in Plain Sight takes you on a ...

Food is never just food. Every bite carries history. Before the potato reached Europe, millions starved on failing grain harvests. Before coffee, there were no coffeehouses — and no Enlightenment debates that changed the course of ideas. Before sugar, there were no Caribbean empires, no transatlantic slave trade, no sweetness without suffering. 50 Foods That Changed the World takes you on a journey across every continent and every era of human civilization — from the wheat fields of ancient Mesopotamia to the sushi restaurants of modern Tokyo. Each of the fifty foods in these pages ...

How a Seth Rogen comedy triggered the most devastating corporate cyberattack in history — and the first time a nation-state went to war against a private company over a movie. In November 2014, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment arrived at work to find a grinning red skeleton on their screens and a message from a group calling itself the Guardians of Peace. Within hours, the company's entire network was destroyed. Within weeks, the full scope became clear: terabytes of stolen data, unreleased films on pirate sites, executive emails splashed across front pages, and the personal ...

La épica historia de uno de los imperios más ricos y poderosos de la Antigüedad.

Grandson of a Signer. Conqueror of California. The Architect of a Divided Empire. Robert Field Stockton was born to the American aristocracy, carrying the weight of his grandfather’s Declaration of Independence into the rigors of the young US Navy. From hunting slavers off the coast of Africa to scattering pirates in the Caribbean, Stockton’s zeal for American expansion knew no bounds. The inventor of the steam battleship, he secured Texas and conquered the California coast for a growing Union. But Stockton’s brilliance was matched only by his contradictions. A man of high Christian ...

History tends to present the time around the birth of Jesus as quiet, sacred, and solemn. Reality was… considerably messier. The world between 10 BC and AD 50 was loud, crowded, political, dangerous, inventive, deeply religious, and sometimes unbelievably strange. Roman emperors ruled with theatrical ego. Street vendors sold questionable food. Doctors prescribed treatments that would horrify modern medicine. Religious movements collided, clashed, and spread through dusty roads and bustling ports. Meanwhile, ordinary people were navigating life in cities filled with sewage systems, ...

El mundo hispano es ese niño atrapado en una infancia de maltratos por parte de unos compañeros de juego crueles y de unos familiares que, ante la pérdida de los padres protectores, lo echan de la casa común de Occidente, lo desprecian, lo dominan, lo convierten en su siervo moral y vasallo cultural… Este libro pretende ser una mano amiga que nos saque del desánimo, lanzándonos a un proceso de recuperación personal y colectiva al recobrar la Hispanidad como un club de lucha y talento.

Before lawyers, before courtrooms, before the presumption of innocence. There was the crocodile. In the ancient world, justice looked very different. Trial by ordeal, divine judgement, brutal punishments, very odd real laws, and other strange facts from history, which shaped the earliest legal systems of human civilization. This entertaining, popular history book explores strange laws, quirky historical facts, bizarre punishments, and unusual justice systems from ancient civilizations. In ancient Egypt, a man accused of a serious crime might be thrown into the Nile. If Sobek, the crocodile ...

Across the world, certain places carry stories that refuse to fade. From ancient castles and abandoned towns to mysterious forests and haunted hotels, legends of ghosts, curses, and unexplained encounters have been passed down for centuries. These stories live at the crossroads of history and folklore, where real events and cultural memory blend into tales that continue to fascinate curious readers. Haunted Places Around the World explores some of the most intriguing locations connected to supernatural lore. Drawing on global folklore, historical accounts, and enduring urban legends, this ...

From speculative bubbles to artificial intelligence, the forces that shape the global economy have repeatedly transformed how we live, work, and build wealth. 50 Economic Events That Shaped Modern Life takes readers on a fascinating journey through the turning points that built today’s world. Beginning with the Tulip Mania of the 1600s and moving through milestones like the Industrial Revolution, the Great Depression, the creation of the Federal Reserve, the rise of China, the 2008 financial crisis, and the AI revolution, this book explores the economic events that changed the course of ...

In the modern world, pineapples sit quietly in grocery stores, stacked in piles and sold for only a few dollars. They are common, ordinary fruit. But there was a time when a single pineapple was worth the equivalent of thousands of dollars. When Europeans first encountered the pineapple during the age of exploration, they had never seen anything like it. Native to the Caribbean and South America, the fruit stunned explorers with its sweetness, fragrance, and exotic appearance. Christopher Columbus brought the first reports of pineapples back to Europe in 1493, and almost immediately the ...

In the early nineteenth century, a Boston entrepreneur proposed an idea that sounded almost absurd. He believed he could make money by selling ice to people living in the tropics. At the time, ice was something most people only experienced during winter. Once the season ended, it disappeared. The idea that frozen water could be harvested, stored, and shipped across oceans seemed unrealistic. But Frederic Tudor believed it could be done. During the winter months in New England, workers cut massive blocks of ice from frozen lakes. These blocks were carefully packed into ships using layers of ...

A spirited exploration of the diary, from pen-and-paper to TikTok, for the people who write—and read—them Featuring iconic diary keepers like Audre Lorde, Virginia Woolf, Alison Bechdel, and Taylor Swift We know what it was like to be an out lesbian in 19th-century England, what the inner...

Every Conflict Turns on a Single, Decisive Moment. History is not a slow, inevitable tide. It is a series of explosive fractures—a spark of defiance, a white flag of capitulation, a covert act of destruction. These are the pivot points upon which the fate of empires, revolutions, and wars are balanced. STRIFE! journeys into the heart of these critical turning points.

In August 2017, over a thousand neo-Nazis, fascists, Klan members, and neo-Confederates descended on a small southern city to protest the pending removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Within an hour of their arrival, the city’s historic downtown was a scene of bedlam as armored far-right...