World Audiobooks | History

Lost Discoveries: The Ancient Roots of Modern Science from the Babylonians to the Mayans

Lost Discoveries, Dick Teresi's innovative history of science, explores the unheralded scientific breakthroughs from peoples of the ancient world -- Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Africans, New World and Oceanic tribes, among others -- and the non-European medieval world. They left an enormous heritage in the fields of mathematics, astronomy, cosmology, physics, geology, chemistry, and technology. The mathematical foundation of Western science is a gift from the Indians, Chinese, Arabs, Babylonians, and Maya. The ancient Egyptians developed the concept of the lowest common denominator, and they developed a fraction table that modern scholars estimate required 28,000 calculations to compile. The Babylonians developed the first written math and used a place-value number system. Our numerals, 0 through 9, were invented in ancient India; the Indians also boasted geometry, trigonometry, and a kind of calculus. Planetary astronomy as well may have begun with the ancient Indians, who correctly identified the relative distances of the known planets from the sun, and knew the moon was nearer to the earth than the sun was. The Chinese observed, reported, dated, recorded, and interpreted eclipses between 1400 and 1200 b.c. Most of the names of our stars and constellations are Arabic. Arabs built the first observatories. Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians said the earth was circular. In the sixth century, a Hindu astronomer taught that the daily rotation of the earth on its axis provided the rising and setting of the sun. Chinese and Arab scholars were the first to use fossils scientifically to trace earth's history. Chinese alchemists realized that most physical substances were merely combinations of other substances, which could be mixed in different proportions. Islamic scholars are legendary for translating scientific texts of many languages into Arabic, a tradition that began with alchemical books. In the eleventh century, Avicenna of Persia divined that outward qualities of metals were of little value in classification, and he stressed internal structure, a notion anticipating Mendeleyev's periodic chart of elements. Iron suspension bridges came from Kashmir, printing from India; papermaking was from China, Tibet, India, and Baghdad; movable type was invented by Pi Sheng in about 1041; the Quechuan Indians of Peru were the first to vulcanize rubber; Andean farmers were the first to freeze-dry potatoes. European explorers depended heavily on Indian and Filipino shipbuilders, and collected maps and sea charts from Javanese and Arab merchants. The first comprehensive, authoritative, popularly written, multicultural history of science, Lost Discoveries fills a crucial gap in the history of science.

Dick Teresi (Author), Peter Johnson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Annals of Tacitus: Excerpts

The Annals, the last and greatest achievement of Tacitus, records the history of the Julio-Claudian emperors from the death of Augustus (14 A.D.) to the reign of Nero (54-68). These are stories of mutiny and murder, of whole armies disappearing beyond the Rhine, of an unstable and gloomy frontier. Tacitus brings us Nero himself, whose reign saw the burning of Rome and the mass slaughter of Christians, and whose vices still captivate and startle us with their imagination and cruelty.

Cornelius Tacitus (Author), George K. Wilson, George Wilson (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Measure of All Things

The Measure of All Things tells the story of how science, revolutionary politics, and the dream of a new economy converged to produce the world's common language of measurement, and its first struggle over globalization. Its central story is of two men, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Delambre and Pierre-Francois-Andre Mechain, who set out on a Herculean labor--to measure the shape of the world--and who discovered that scientific integrity could lead to tragedy as well as triumph. The book reveals that a secret error lies at the heart of the metric system--an error perpetuated in every subsequent definition of the meter. The only people who knew the full extent of the error were Delambre and Mechain themselves, because Delambre placed all their intimate correspondence, as well as their scientific notebooks and private journals, under closed seal in the archives of the Paris Observatory. These papers reveal that Mechain--despite his extreme caution in making his observations--committed an error in the early years of their expedition, and worse, upon discovering his mistake, covered it up. Mechain was so tormented by the secret knowledge of his error that he was driven to the brink of madness. In the end, he died in an attempt to correct himself.

Ken Alder (Author), Brian Jennings (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

By the Author of the Bestselling Pulitzer Prize Finalist THE FIRST AMERICAN THEY WENT WEST TO CHANGE THEIR LIVES AND IN THE BARGAIN THEY CHANGED THE WORLD. THIS IS THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE GOLD RUSH. When gold was first discovered on the American River above Sutter’s Fort in January 1848, California was sparsely populated frontier territory not yet ceded to the United States from Mexixo. The discovery triggered a massive influx as hundreds of thousands of people scrambled to California in search of riches, braving dangerous journeys across the Pacific, around Cape Horn, and through the Isthmus of Panama, as well as across America’s vast, unsettled wilderness. Cities sprang up overnight, in response to the demand for supplies and services of all kinds. By 1850, California had become a state — the fastest journey to statehood in U.S. history. It had also become a symbol of what America stood for and of where it was going. In The Age of Gold, H. W. Brands explores the far-reaching implications of this pivotal point in U.S. history, weaving the politics of the times with the gripping stories of individuals that displays both the best and the worse of the American character. He discusses the national issues that exploded around the ratification of California’s statehood, hastening the clouds that would lead to the Civil War. He tells the stories of the great fortunes made by such memorable figures as John and Jessie Fremont, Leland Stanford and George Hearst — and of great fortunes lost by hundreds now forgotten by history. And he reveals the profound effect of the Gold Rush on the way Americans viewed their destinies, as the Puritan ethic of hard work and the gradual accumulation of worldly riches gave way to the notion of getting rich quickly.

H. W. Brands (Author), Brian Mancinelli (Narrator)

Audiobook

Crossroads of Freedom: Antietam

James M. McPherson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning, New York Times best-selling author, and America's leading Civil War historian. In this powerful book, he reconstructs the gripping Battle of Antietam-the single bloodiest day in the history of American combat. In stunning detail and with remarkable insight, McPherson makes a convincing case that Antietam was the battle that changed the course of the war.

James M. Mcpherson, James McPherson (Author), Nelson Runger (Narrator)

Audiobook

In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

In this New York Times best-seller, Norman F. Cantor digs through the medical evidence and concludes that the Black Death of the 14th century was probably two diseases at once: bubonic plague and anthrax. He shows how these diseases affected the masses as well as individuals, and thus altered history. Concise, informative, and touched with dark humor, this book is a startlingly fresh view of a frightening epidemic.

Norman F. Cantor (Author), John McDonough (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Long Way From Home: Growing Up in the American Heartland

Reflections on America and the American experience as he has lived and observed it, by the bestselling author of The Greatest Generation. In this beautiful memoir, Tom Brokaw writes of America and of the American experience. From his parents' life in theThirties, on to his boyhood along the Missouri River and on the prairies of South Dakota in the Forties, into his early journalism career in the Fifties and the tumultuous Sixties, up to the present, this personal story is a reflection on America in our time. Tom Brokaw writes about growing up and coming of age in the heartland, and of the family, the people, the culture and the values that shaped him then and still do today. His father, Red Brokaw, a genius with machines, followed the instincts of Tom's mother Jean, and took the risk of moving his small family from an Army base to Pickstown, South Dakota, where Red got a job as a heavy equipment operator in the Army Corps of Engineers' project building the Ft. Randall dam along the Missouri River. Tom Brokaw describes how this move became the pivotal decision in their lives, as the Brokaw family, along with others after World War II, began to live out the American Dream: community, relative prosperity, middle class pleasures and good educations for their children. "Along the river and in the surrounding hills, I had a Tom Sawyer boyhood," Brokaw writes; and as he describes his own pilgrimage as it unfolded-from childhood to love, marriage, the early days in broadcast journalism, and beyond-he also reflects on what brought him and so many Americans of his generation to lead lives a long way from home, yet forever affected by it.

Tom Brokaw (Author), Dan Cashman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Yiddish Radio Project

Living moments in the history from the Golden Age of Yiddish radio (1930-1955), heard nationally on NPR's All Things Considered From the 1930s to '50s, Yiddish radio was popular from coast to coast. By 1985, it was all but forgotten. Then musician/historian Henry Sapoznik discovered a few dozen acetate-coated aluminum discs at a rummage sale. He tracked down a special turntable, put on the first disc and heard: "From atop the Loews State Theater Building, the B. Manischewitz Company, world's largest matzo bakers, happily presents Yiddish Melodies in Swing..." Sapoznik spent the next 17 years searching for more surviving discs. Most had been melted down during WWII scrap-metal drives, others had disintegrated, but he found over a thousand--in attics, storerooms, even dumpsters. Each fragile artifact was a one-of-a-kind window into Jewish immigrant culture during the first half of the 20th century. Searing dramas, swinging music, news programs, advice and game shows, man-on-the-street interviews, commercials, and shtick leaped to life after decades of silence. Lovingly restored, with translations performed by a cast including Carl Reiner, Eli Wallach, and Yiddish stars, the Yiddish Radio Project is a journey through time to a lost world--intimate, passionate, raucous, and utterly fascinating.

Henry Sapoznik (Author), Carl Reiner, Eli Wallach (Narrator)

Audiobook

Lusitania: An Epic Tragedy

A brilliantly sunny day, and then the explosion; on what had been an ordinary weekday, there is suddenly fire, smoke, confusion, bodies, panic... On May 7, 1915, the ocean liner Lusitania was struck by a terrifying new weapon-and became a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. This is a vivid account of the event that shocked the world; of the heyday of the luxury liner and the first days of the modern submarine; a critical chapter in the progress of World War I; and a remarkable human drama. With first-person survivor accounts and a cast of characters ranging from Winston Churchill and Alfred Vanderbilt to the crew of the German U-boat that torpedoed a ship full of civilians, this is a true tale of terror and tragedy, of heroism and miraculous survival.

Diana Preston (Author), Anne Twomey (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream

By the Author of the Bestselling Pulitzer Prize Finalist THE FIRST AMERICAN THEY WENT WEST TO CHANGE THEIR LIVES AND IN THE BARGAIN THEY CHANGED THE WORLD. THIS IS THE EXTRAORDINARY STORY OF THE MEN AND WOMEN OF THE GOLD RUSH. When gold was first discovered on the American River above Sutter's Fort in January 1848, California was sparsely populated frontier territory not yet ceded to the United States from Mexixo. The discovery triggered a massive influx as hundreds of thousands of people scrambled to California in search of riches, braving dangerous journeys across the Pacific, around Cape Horn, and through the Isthmus of Panama, as well as across America's vast, unsettled wilderness. Cities sprang up overnight, in response to the demand for supplies and services of all kinds. By 1850, California had become a state -- the fastest journey to statehood in U.S. history. It had also become a symbol of what America stood for and of where it was going. In The Age of Gold, H. W. Brands explores the far-reaching implications of this pivotal point in U.S. history, weaving the politics of the times with the gripping stories of individuals that displays both the best and the worse of the American character. He discusses the national issues that exploded around the ratification of California's statehood, hastening the clouds that would lead to the Civil War. He tells the stories of the great fortunes made by such memorable figures as John and Jessie Fremont, Leland Stanford and George Hearst -- and of great fortunes lost by hundreds now forgotten by history. And he reveals the profound effect of the Gold Rush on the way Americans viewed their destinies, as the Puritan ethic of hard work and the gradual accumulation of worldly riches gave way to the notion of getting rich quickly.

H. W. Brands, H.W. Brands (Author), Brian Mancinelli, Grover Gardner (Narrator)

Audiobook

What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response

Bernard Lewis is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor of Near Eastern Studies Emeritus at Princeton University and the author of The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; The Emergence of Modern Turkey; The Arabs in History; and What Went Wrong?: Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, among other books. Lewis is internationally recognized as one of our era's greatest historians of the Middle East. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages, including Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Indonesian. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Bernard Lewis (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

Audiobook

[French] - Les plus belles Histoires de Haim - Vol 4: Comme si vous y étiez

Haim Nisenbaum, Yossef Brami (Author), Yossef Brami (Narrator)

Audiobook

World Audiobooks in History