Audiobooks narrated by Bill Caufield

The Innovations of World War I: The History of the Technological Advances that Defined the Great War

World War I, also known in its time as the “Great War” or the “War to End all Wars”, was an unprecedented holocaust in terms of its sheer scale. Fought by men who hailed from all corners of the globe, it saw millions of soldiers do battle in brutal assaults of attrition which dragged on for months with little to no respite. Tens of millions of artillery shells and untold hundreds of millions of rifle and machine gun bullets were fired in a conflict that demonstrated man’s capacity to kill each other on a heretofore unprecedented scale. Since the industrial revolution, arms and materiel output had increased by orders of magnitude, as had the quality and uniformity of the products. Several developments had already taken place in the years building up to the conflict, stepping stones towards the vast escalation in military innovation which took place immediately prior to and during World War I. Innovations included the adoption into service of the first belt-fed machine guns, predecessors of those which would wreak such slaughter in the trenches, and the development of cannon which did not roll backwards after each shot as 19th century pieces did, but remained fixed in place. The arms race before the war and the attempt to break the deadlock of the Western and Eastern Fronts by any means possible changed the face of battle in ways that would have previously been deemed unthinkable. Before 1914, flying machines were objects of public curiosity; the first flights of any account on rotor aircraft had been made less than 5 years before and were considered to be the province of daredevils and lunatics. By 1918, all the great powers were fielding squadrons of fighting aircraft armed with machine-guns and bombs, to say nothing of light reconnaissance planes. Tanks, a common feature on the battlefield by 1918, had not previously existed outside of the realm of science fiction stories written by authors like H.G. Wells.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Aftermath of World War II: The Political, Legal, and Technological Ramifications of History’s De

At the end of World War II, the world was faced with some sobering statistics. With over 50,000,000 deaths when both military and civilian losses had been accounted for, the death toll was devastating, and for many of those who lived in countries that had been ravaged by war, hunger and financial strain had become parts of daily life. Furthermore, beyond the physical damage was the growing knowledge of the atrocities that had been committed both before and during the war. In fact, the Allies were discussing how to dole out justice for Axis war crimes as early as 1943, and once the war was over, it was time for the nations to turn their attention towards determining the proper punishments. In the wake of the war, the European continent was devastated, and the conflict left the Soviet Union and the United States as uncontested superpowers. This ushered in over 45 years of Cold War, and a political alignment of Western democracies against the Communist Soviet bloc that produced conflicts pitting allies on each sides fighting, even as the American and Soviet militaries never engaged each other. Though it never truly got “hot” between the two superpowers directly, the Cold War was a tense era until the dissolution of the USSR, and nothing symbolized the split more than the division of Berlin. If anyone wondered whether the Cold War would dominate geopolitics, any hopes that it wouldn’t were dashed by the Soviets’ blockade of West Berlin in April 1948, ostensibly to protest the currency being used in West Berlin but unquestionably aiming to extend their control over Germany’s capital. By cutting off all access via roads, rail, and water, the Soviets hoped to force the Allies out, and at the same time, Stalin’s action would force a tense showdown that would test their mettle.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

Rome’s Conquest of Western Europe: The History of the Campaigns that Expanded the Roman Empire acros

The Roman army is one of the most famous fighting forces in history. Through its power and prowess, a once obscure Italian city forged an empire that encircled the Mediterranean and covered half of Europe. The physical remains of its presence can be traced from the mountainous borders of Scotland to the arid deserts of Egypt, but its legacy is far greater and more enduring, as Rome's influence continues to shape the political, legal, and cultural landscape of Europe to this very day. Quite simply, in terms of scale, the Gallic Wars were unmatched by anything the Roman Republic had witnessed since the Punic Wars. By the end of the campaigns, ancient historians estimated that more than a million people had died, and still more displaced or enslaved. Even by the more conservative estimates of modern historians, a casualty count in the hundreds of thousands appears possible. Either way, the war was a cataclysm, involving tens of thousands of combatants, and it also marked the greatest displays of skill by one of the greatest generals history has ever known. Despite all the accomplishments and widespread victories and conquests throughout Rome’s long history, the Romans seemingly failed in one crucial conquest: the subjugation of Germany. Indeed, historians have singled out this one failure as central to the ultimate downfall of the entire empire, as the constant wars against the Germanic tribes, and the need to defend the frontier on the Rhine at great expense against those tribes, helped bring the empire to its knees. There are elements of truth in such a conclusion, but the reality was far more fluid than is often realized. In fact, from the 1st century B.C. until the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century A.D., the relationships between the wider empire and those living in what is now modern Germany were extremely complicated, involving much more than simple warfare.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

Ending the World Wars: The History of the Events and Battles that Finished World War I and World War

For much of 1917, things went the Germans’ way. With the Bolshevik Revolution underway, the Germans were able to move soldiers to the Western front as the Russians quit the war. Moreover, the Allied powers had failed badly in its Nivelle Offensive in May 1917 and suffered a defeat in November against at the Battle of Caporetto in Slovenia. Unbelievably, the French and British had not bothered to coordinate their commands until after those defeats: they finally formed a Supreme Council to coordinate their armies’ movements and strategies. However, the Allied Powers began a counteroffensive known as the Hundred Days Offensive in August 1918 that was highly successful in pushing the Germans backward. In September, Bulgaria reached a separate armistice with the Allied powers, ceding control of the Balkans and cutting off German supplies. The defeated Ottoman Empire surrendered in late October. As the fortunes of the Central Powers waned, several lands in Austria-Hungary’s empire began declaring independence. Finally, in November, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced into exile, and the Germans reached an armistice with the Allied powers at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918. World War I had finally ended. After the successful amphibious invasion on D-Day in June 1944, the Allies began racing east toward Germany and liberating France along the way. The Allies had landed along a 50 mile stretch of French coast, and despite suffering 8,000 casualties on D-Day, over 100,000 still began the march across the western portion of the continent. By the end of August 1944, the German Army in France was shattered, with 200,000 killed or wounded and a further 200,000 captured. However, Adolf Hitler reacted to the news of invasion with glee, figuring it would give the Germans a chance to destroy the Allied armies that had water to their backs.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Appeasement of Nazi Germany: The History of the Western Allies’ Failed Attempts to Placate Hitle

A single act of arson against the famous Reichstag building proved to be the catalyst that propelled Adolf Hitler to victory in the elections of March 1933, which set the German nation irrevocably on the path towards World War II. That war would plunge much of the planet into an existential battle that ultimately cost an estimated 60 million lives. Of course, the Western Europeans tried and failed in notorious fashion to prevent that war by appeasing Hitler, who only became more ambitious as France and Britain refused to push back on his growing aggression, especially in the wake of the Anschluss, which Hitler’s future enemies all but justified due to Austria’s large German population. The Munich Agreement is now notorious because its promise proved barren within a very short period of time. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's actions either failed to avert or actually hastened the very cataclysm he wished to avoid at all costs. The agreement effectively signed away Czechoslovakia's independence to Hitler's hungry new Third Reich, and within two years, most of the world found itself plunged into a conflict anyway. Initially, many people hailed Chamberlain's 'success' at defusing Nazi aggression by handing over Czechoslovakia tamely to Hitler's control, but others remained dubious. Édouard Daladier, the French prime minister, 'later told Amery that he turned up his coat collar to protect his face from rotten eggs when he arrived in Paris.' A Foreign Office man, Orme Sargent, was disgusted, and he later said bitterly, 'For all the fun and cheers, you might think they were celebrating a major victory over an enemy instead of merely the betrayal of a minor ally.' Winston Churchill, the deal’s most famous critic, bitterly remarked, “England has been offered a choice between war and shame. She has chosen shame, and will get war.”

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Fall of Rome and Constantinople: The History of the Attacks that Destroyed the Western Roman Emp

For the people of the ancient Mediterranean and beyond, the city of Rome had been a symbol of power for centuries, and entering the early 5th century CE, the Eternal City hadn’t been taken by an enemy force since the Gauls had done it about 800 years earlier, an unheard of period of tranquility in a world wracked with almost constant warfare. Thus, when the Visigoths, whom the Romans considered uncultured and inferior, took the city of Rome and sacked it in 410, the world was stunned. It made theologians of the newly Christianized empire question God’s plan on Earth, and it encouraged many leading Romans to look east to Constantinople for their future. Indeed, the Western Roman Empire would completely collapse in the late 5th century, less than 70 years after the Visigoths sacked Rome, and just how it went from being a superpower to a poorly led, weak, and vulnerable shadow of its former self has preoccupied historians for centuries. To this day, it remains difficult to trace just when the decline began, but it’s fair to say that the sack of Rome was the result of a number of factors that had been coalescing for many years. In the end, the fall of the Roman Empire was not a tale of cataclysmic events that shattered the sprawling power, but the culmination of centuries of internal dissent and decay, combined with growing external threats that led to gradual decline and eventually to the empire’s final destruction. In terms of geopolitics, perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453. The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the 4th century, when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there, effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquity’s greatest empire. Constantinople would continue to serve as the capital of the Byzantine Empire even after the Western half of the Roman Empire collapsed.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

NASA’s Deadly Accidents: The History of the Disasters that Killed 17 Astronauts

As Apollo 11’s name suggests, there were actually a number of Apollo missions that came before, many of which included testing the rockets and different orbital and lunar modules in orbit. In fact, it wasn’t until Apollo 8 that a manned vehicle was sent towards the Moon and back, and before that mission, the most famous Apollo mission was Apollo 1, albeit for all the wrong reasons. There were no delusions regarding the dangers of manned space travel, but they were brought home on January 27, 1967, when all three astronauts were killed by a fire that ignited in the cabin during a launch rehearsal. To this day, there is still debate over what ignited the fire, but the disaster made clear that the modules being used by NASA had a series of fatal flaws. In the decades after the Apollo program, American space shuttles flew over 130 missions and successfully completed over 98% of them, but unfortunately, the two most famous missions were the ones that ended tragically aboard the Challenger and Columbia. The Space Shuttle Challenger was the most heavily used space shuttle in the three years it was operational, carrying the first minority astronaut and woman astronaut into space. Challenger was also the first space shuttle to complete a landing at night. The notorious date of the Challenger disaster was commemorated by the crew of the Columbia while they were in space in 2003, and a few days later, on February 1, the Columbia was due to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 09:16. Only a few members of the press were present to watch the landing - this was, after all, supposed to be a routine return from a routine mission, the 113th for the shuttle program and the 28th for Columbia, one of the oldest Space Shuttles.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire: The History and Legacy of Europe’s Most Important Empire and

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

Warfare in Ancient Greece: The History of the Greeks’ Wars on Land and Sea in Antiquity

Although the armies of the ancient Greek, or “Hellenic”, city-states (poleis, singular polis) included both cavalry (hippeis) and light infantry (psiloi, peltastes, gymnetes), their mainstay was undoubtedly the heavy infantry known today as hoplites. Armed to the teeth with their distinctive round shield (aspis or hoplon), high-crested helmet (corys) and long spear (dory), the hoplites were some of the most efficient soldiers of their time. They fought in the tight phalanx formation, and beyond the confines of their small poleis, Greek hoplites were also prized as mercenaries throughout the ancient world. Most historians believe that the hoplite became the dominant infantry soldier in nearly all the Greek city-states around the 8th century BCE. Hoplites were responsible for acquiring their own equipment, so not every hoplite might have been equally armed, but considering the style of warfare, they needed as much uniformity as possible. Like most infantry outside of Greece, the hoplites also carried spears, but while the Persian weapons were short and light for example, the Greek spears were thick shafts anywhere between seven and nine feet long. These spears were topped by a 9-inch spearhead, with a “lizard-sticker” buttspike at the bottom which could be used as a secondary spearhead if the main weapon was snapped off, or to plant the spear upright when at rest. Each hoplite also carried a shortsword, designed specifically for thrusting in the close confines of a melee (the Spartan weapon, the xiphos, was so short as to be virtually a dagger, its blade barely over a foot long). It was only with the advent of the more mobile Roman legion, and the defeat of phalanxes in battles like Cynoscephalae (197 BCE) and Pydna (168 BCE), that the hoplite phalanx was finally outclassed

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

NASA’s Deadly Accidents: The History of the Disasters that Killed 17 Astronauts

As Apollo 11’s name suggests, there were actually a number of Apollo missions that came before, many of which included testing the rockets and different orbital and lunar modules in orbit. In fact, it wasn’t until Apollo 8 that a manned vehicle was sent towards the Moon and back, and before that mission, the most famous Apollo mission was Apollo 1, albeit for all the wrong reasons. There were no delusions regarding the dangers of manned space travel, but they were brought home on January 27, 1967, when all three astronauts were killed by a fire that ignited in the cabin during a launch rehearsal. To this day, there is still debate over what ignited the fire, but the disaster made clear that the modules being used by NASA had a series of fatal flaws. In the decades after the Apollo program, American Space Shuttles flew over 130 missions and successfully completed over 98% of them, but unfortunately, the two most famous missions were the ones that ended tragically aboard the Challenger and Columbia. The notorious date of the Challenger disaster was commemorated by the crew of the Columbia while they were in space in 2003, and a few days later, on February 1, the Columbia was due to land at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 09:16. At 08:59, 17 minutes before it was scheduled to land, Columbia was passing over Texas 37 miles above the ground and reentering the atmosphere. Mission Control was discussing a landing gear tire pressure issue with Mission Commander Rick Husband when radio transmission from the shuttle abruptly ceased. Within hours, it would become clear that Columbia had disintegrated over Central Texas, scattering debris and the remains of the seven people aboard over thousands of square miles of east Texas and southern Louisiana.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

Moctezuma II and Tupac Amaru II: The Lives and Legacies of Latin America’s Most Famous Indigenous Le

From the moment Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortés first found and confronted them, the Aztecs have fascinated the world, and they continue to hold a unique place both culturally and in pop culture. Nearly 500 years after the Spanish conquered their mighty empire, the Aztecs are often remembered today for their major capital, Tenochtitlan, as well as being fierce conquerors of the Valley of Mexico who often engaged in human sacrifice rituals. Ironically, and unlike the Mayans, the Aztecs are not widely viewed or remembered with nuance, in part because their own leader burned extant Aztec writings and rewrote a mythologized history explaining his empire’s dominance less than a century before the Spanish arrived. Naturally, Cortes and other Spaniards depicted the Aztecs as savages greatly in need of conversion to Catholicism. While the Mayans are remembered for their astronomy, numeral system, and calendar, the Aztecs have primarily been remembered in a far narrower way, despite continuing to be a source of pride to Mexicans through the centuries. As a result, even though the Aztecs continue to interest people across the world centuries after their demise, it has fallen on archaeologists and historians to try to determine the actual history, culture, and lives of the Aztecs from the beginning to the end, relying on excavations, primary accounts, and more. The Incas had consolidated their empire only a century before Pizarro and his Spanish conquistadores took control of Inca lands in the 1530s. The Incan heartland was the Andes Mountains from Ecuador down through Peru into parts of northern Chile, including what is now Bolivia, some of Argentina, and in the north, bits of what is now Colombia. It covered about 770,000 square miles, far larger than Spain, and held an estimated 14 million people, more than in Spain, comprised of many different indigenous groups.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

Apollo 1 and the Space Shuttle Challenger: The History of NASA’s Two Most Notorious Disasters

As Apollo 11’s name suggests, there were actually a number of Apollo missions that came before, many of which included testing the rockets and different orbital and lunar modules in orbit. In fact, it wasn’t until Apollo 8 that a manned vehicle was sent towards the Moon and back, and before that mission, the most famous Apollo mission was Apollo 1, albeit for all the wrong reasons. There were no delusions regarding the dangers of manned space travel, but they were brought home on January 27, 1967, when all three astronauts were killed by a fire that ignited in the cabin during a launch rehearsal. To this day, there is still debate over what ignited the fire, but the disaster made clear that the modules being used by NASA had a series of fatal flaws. After the Apollo 1 tragedy, NASA changed its plans by first running a series of unmanned missions to test the Saturn rockets and the different modules throughout 1967 and early 1968. and it would not be until Apollo 7 launched about 20 months after the disaster that NASA dared to conduct another manned mission. On the morning of January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger launched for the 10th time, beginning mission STS-51-L. Space shuttles had already successfully completed 24 missions, and no American spacecraft had ever failed to reach orbit during an official mission. On this mission, the Challenger was carrying a satellite for the Tracking and Data Relay Satellites system, which was to be deployed in orbit. The crew included Ronald McNair, who had already been the second African-American in space, and Ellison Onizuka, who had already been the first Asian-American astronaut in space. But the highlight of the mission was to be the “NASA Teacher in Space Project,” in which a civilian teacher would give teaching lessons to his or her class while onboard the space shuttle.

Charles River Editors (Author), Bill Caufield (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by Bill Caufield