Early English History

Early Balloons and Airships: The History of the City’s Underground Ossuaries and Burial Network looks at the development of the first balloons and airships, and how they were primarily used. You will learn about the first airships like never before.

The history of the United States is, to a large extent, a history of armed conflict. The nation was first forged in war, a tough fight for independence against one of the world’s largest empires, and that fight would resume less than a generation later with the War of 1812. Then, there were constant low-level conflicts with Native Americans as the nation expanded westwards, and occasionally, the country engaged in full-scale war against the Sioux, Comanche, and Apache.

In 2010, using a specialized robotic camera, authors Tabor and Jacobovici, working with archaeologists, geologists, and forensic anthropologists, explored a previously unexcavated tomb in Jerusalem from around the time of Jesus. They made a remarkable discovery. The tomb contained several ossuaries, or bone boxes, two of which were carved with an iconic image and a Greek inscription. Taken together, the image and the inscription constitute the earliest archaeological evidence of faith in Jesus’ resurrection.

For the hermits and communal monks of antiquity, the desert was a place to flee the cacophony of ordinary life in order to hear and contemplate the voice of God. But these monks discovered something surprising in their harsh desert surroundings: far from empty and silent, the desert is richly reverberant. Sonorous Desert shares the stories and sayings of these ancient spiritual seekers, tracing how the ambient sounds of wind, thunder, water, and animals shaped the emergence and development of early Christian monasticism.

On the eve of a major treaty conference between Iroquois leaders and European colonists in the distant summer of 1722, two White fur traders attacked an Indigenous hunter and left him for dead near Conestoga, Pennsylvania. This act of brutality set into motion a remarkable series of criminal investigations and cross-cultural negotiations that challenged the definition of justice in early America. Leading historian Nicole Eustace reconstructs the crime and its aftermath, bringing us into the overlapping worlds of white colonists and Indigenous peoples in this formative period.

The Dīghanikāya or Long Discourses of the Buddha is one of the four major collections of teachings from the early period of Buddhism. Its 34 suttas (in Sanskrit, sutras) demonstrate remarkable breadth in both content and style, forming a comprehensive collection. The Art of Listening gives an introduction to the Dīghanikāya and demonstrates the historical, cultural, and spiritual insights that emerge when we view the Buddhist suttas as oral literature.

With this audiobook, we want to let our listeners know how vibrant and lively (as well as deadly) life in Britain was during the perhaps wrongly-titled “Dark Ages”. With the end of the Roman Empire, the local Britons were left to their devices, and it would be several people groups from a peninsula in Central Europe that would come to dominate the island, making sure their presence was known through a series of kingdoms, battles, clashes, victories, and defeats.

The Dutch, through the directors of the West India Company, purchased Manhattan Island in 1625. They had come to the New World as traders, not expecting to assume responsibility as the sovereign possessor of a conquered New Netherland. They did not intend to make war on the native peoples around Manhattan Island, but they did; they did not intend to help destroy native cultures, but they did; they intended to be overseas the tolerant, pluralistic, and antimilitaristic people they thought themselves to be - and in so many respects were - at home, but they were not.

The Berlin blockade brought former allies to the brink of war. Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union defeated and began their occupation of Germany in 1945, and within a few years, the Soviets and their Western partners were jockeying for control of their former foe. Attempting to thwart the Allied powers' plans to create a unified West German government, the Soviets blocked rail and road access to the western sectors of Berlin in June 1948.

Part Blackhawk Down, part The Riddle of the Sands, former MI6 officer Harry Ferguson has written an extraordinarily gripping non-fiction thriller. Operation Kronstadt not only reveals the early days of intelligence services but also uncovers a truly dramatic story from the Russian Revolution involving a daring rescue attempt and a "mission impossible" against the best defended naval target in Russia.

The area that became known as the Old Northwest caught the eye of European settlers as far back as the 17th century, when the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet found that waterways in the area connected the Mississippi River to the Great Lakes. The area was perfect for fur trade outposts before it was settled by whites. Throughout the 19th century, American settlers pushing across the Western frontier came into contact with diverse American tribes, producing a series of conflicts ranging from the Great Plains to the Southwest, and from the Trail of Tears to the Pacific Northwest.

The 1950s were a transformative, even revolutionary decade in the history of brain science. Using new techniques for probing brain activity and function, researchers in neurosurgery, psychiatry, and psychology achieved dramatic breakthroughs in the treatment of illnesses like epilepsy and schizophrenia, as well as the understanding of such faculties as memory and perception. Memory was the site of particularly startling discoveries.

Technically speaking, slavery was not legal in the English-speaking world before the mid-17th century. But long before race-based slavery was entrenched in law and practice, English men and women were well aware of the various forms of human bondage practiced in other nations and, in less systematic ways, their own country. In wide-ranging detail, Slaves and Englishmen demonstrates how slavery shaped the ways the English interacted with people and places throughout the Atlantic world. As this revealing history shows, the implications of slavery were closely connected to the question of what it meant to be English.

FNH Audio presents an unabridged reading of this WWI naval history by an author who actually took part in the battle(s) described. This plain, unvarnished account, so far as is known, is the first attempt that has been made to link with the description of the Battle of the Falkland Islands, fought on December 8th 1914, to the events leading up to that engagement. Each phase presented has been read and approved by officers who participated.

From the Stono Rebellion in 1739 to the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to Nat Turner's Rebellion in 1831, slave insurrections have been understood as emblematic rejections of enslavement, the most powerful and, perhaps, the only way for slaves to successfully challenge the brutal system they endured. In The World That Fear Made, Jason T. Sharples orients the mirror to those in power who were preoccupied with their exposure to insurrection.

Our Island Story, originally published in 1905 and later updated, details the history of Britain up to World War I (including some myths and legends associated with British history). Author H. E. Marshall based the book on her answers to her children's questions about the history of their "home island" (Great Britain). This volume covers the earliest historical period.

When Samuel de Champlain founded the colony of Quebec in 1608, he established elaborate gardens where he sowed French seeds he had brought with him and experimented with indigenous plants that he found in nearby fields and forests. In A Not-So-New World, Christopher Parsons observes how it was that French colonists began to learn about Native environments and claimed a mandate to cultivate vegetation that did not differ all that much from that which they had left behind.

This volume offers an accessible investigation of the Naassene discourse embedded in the anonymous Refutation of All Heresies (completed about 222 CE), in order to understand the theology and ritual life of the Naassene Christian movement in the late second and early third centuries CE. The work provides basic data on the date, genre, and provenance of the Naassene discourse as summarized by the author of the Refutation (or Refutator).

Like Rothbard before him, Dr. Newman has authored a book that is masterfully researched and captivatingly written. Even the most voracious listener of American history will never see some of America's "Great Men" the same way again. Cronyism: Liberty Versus Power in America 1607-1849 describes the evolution of political favor seeking in early American history, from the colonial era to the Mexican War. Newman argues that cronyism emerged from the perennial clash between the forces of liberty and power.

At the dawn of the 19th century, the great powers of Western Europe treated the United States like a disobedient child. America's complaints were ignored, until President James Madison declared a second war on Great Britain. British forces would descend on the United States, but America rallied and survived. With stunning detail on land and naval battles, the role Native Americans played in the hostilities, and the larger backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, this is the story of the turning points of this strange conflict, which inspired Francis Scott Key to write "The Star-Spangled Banner".