Europe America

Although a British document, the Magna Carta was an influential and important written document that helped shape the foundation of America. Listeners will discover why this primary source is so important, the context behind the document, and how it inspired key U.S. documents like the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

This audiobook tells the story of how Spain managed to conquer the Americas in the span of half a century, from the late 1400s to the mid-1500s. Although exploitation and warfare continued between the colonizers and the colonized after this period, the largest campaigns against the indigenous peoples were undertaken in this short time span, which is the focus of this audiobook.

In The Dutch Moment, Wim Klooster shows how the Dutch built and eventually lost an Atlantic empire that stretched from the homeland in the United Provinces to the Hudson River and from Brazil and the Caribbean to the African Gold Coast. The fleets and armies that fought for the Dutch in the decades-long war against Spain included numerous foreigners, largely drawn from countries in northwestern Europe. Likewise, many settlers of Dutch colonies were born in other parts of Europe or the New World.

In Red Sauce, Ian MacAllen traces the evolution of traditional Italian-American cuisine, often referred to as "red sauce Italian," from its origins in Italy to its transformation in America into a new, distinct cuisine. It is a fascinating social and culinary history exploring the integration of red sauce food into mainstream America alongside the blending of Italian immigrant otherness into a national American identity.

The D-Day invasion of Nazi-occupied Europe, launched on June 6, 1944, is widely referred to as the longest day of World War Two. Historian Victor Brooks argues that 1944 was, in effect, the longest year for Americans of that era both in terms of United States casualties and in deciding the outcome of war itself.

A dazzlingly original account of the life and thought of Adam Smith, the greatest economist of all time. In Adam Smith, political philosopher Jesse Norman dispels the myths and caricatures, and provides a far more complex portrait of the man. Offering a highly engaging account of Smith's life and times, Norman explores his work as a whole and traces his influence over two centuries to the present day. Finally, he shows how a proper understanding of Smith can help us address the problems of modern capitalism.

The Haitian Revolution: The History and Legacy of the Slave Uprising that Led to Haiti’s Independence chronicles how the only successful slave uprising came about, and why it ended French control of the island. You will learn about the revolution like never before.

In The Rule of Empires, Timothy Parsons gives a sweeping account of the evolution of empire from its origins in ancient Rome to its most recent twentieth-century embodiment. He explains what constitutes an empire and offers suggestions about what empires of the past can tell us about our own historical moment. Parsons uses imperial examples that stretch from ancient Rome, to Britain's "new" imperialism in Kenya, to the Third Reich to parse the features common to all empires, their evolutions and self-justifying myths, and the reasons for their inevitable decline.

The Italian campaign's outcome was never certain; in fact, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military advisers engaged in heated debate about whether an invasion of the so-called soft underbelly of Europe was even a good idea. But once under way, the commitment to liberate Italy from the Nazis never wavered, despite the agonizingly high price.

In this last book of a three-volume series, William L. Shirer recounts his return to Berlin after the Third Reich’s defeat. Having fled Berlin and imminent arrest by the Gestapo in 1940, Shirer returned to Europe in October 1945 to verify the facts of the Fuhrer’s death, thus bringing to a close - or so he thought - his involvement with the Third Reich. He describes his return to his homeland and his ensuing careers as a broadcast journalist and author. He describes the McCarthy years and how the blacklist affected his own network, CBS.

Europe has fallen. Pearl Harbor is in flames. Enter: the Eighth. In 1941 the RAF fought a desperate battle of survival against the Luftwaffe over Britain. Then, from across the Atlantic, came a new generation of American pilots, gunners, and bombardiers, a new generation of flying machines called the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator, the P-47 Thunderbolt, and the P-51 Mustang fighter.

Patagonia is in the southernmost region of South America, comprising about 400,000 square miles going from the Colorado River in the north to the Tierra del Fuego archipelago in the south. Longitudinally, it covers the whole continental soil, going from the Atlantic shore to the Pacific’s waters, including a few islands near the coast, part of the South American plate.

The English explorer Henry Hudson devoted his life to the search for a water route through America, becoming the first European to navigate the Hudson River in the process. In Fatal Journey, acclaimed historian and biographer Peter C. Mancall narrates Hudsons final expedition.

This groundbreaking audiobook offers a new analysis of the British Army during the "American rebellion" at both operational and tactical levels. Presenting fresh insights into the speed of British tactical movements, Spring discloses how the system for training the army prior to 1775 was overhauled and adapted to the peculiar conditions confronting it in North America.

Maya Jasanoff won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her groundbreaking work Liberty's Exiles. After the American Revolution, 60,000 British loyalists fled the U.S. for Canada, the Caribbean, India, and other points abroad. Jasanoff traces their harrowing journeys across the globe, shedding light on their ambitions, the post-revolutionary world they encountered, and their legacies.

New York Times best-selling author Martin Dugard writes the first account of Columbus’s little-known last voyage. Columbus’ famed 1492 expedition wasn’t his last. After tough times, he was given one more chance. But this voyage didn’t have the fortuitous accidents of 1492. Instead it brought a shipwreck and more violence and mutiny than ever before - pushing an aging explorer to his limit.

If you were black in America at the start of the Revolutionary War, whom would you want to win? In response to a declaration by the last governor of Virginia that any rebel-owned slave who escaped and served the King would be emancpated, tens of thousands of blacks voted with feet, escaping to fight beside the British. Originally designed to break the plantations of the American South, this military strategy instead unleashed one of the great exoduses in American history.

In Americans in Paris, tales of adventure, intrigue, passion, deceit, and survival unfold season by season as renowned journalist Charles Glass tells the story of a remarkable cast of expatriates and their struggles in Nazi Paris. Before the Second World War began, approximately thirty thousand Americans lived in Paris, and when war broke out in 1939 almost five thousand remained.

Hitler's American Friends, by Bradley W. Hart, is an audiobook examining the strange terrain of Nazi sympathizers, nonintervention campaigners, and other voices in America who advocated on behalf of Nazi Germany in the years before World War II. Americans who remember World War II reminisce about how it brought the country together. The less-popular truth behind this warm nostalgia: Until the attack on Pearl Harbor, America was deeply, dangerously divided.

On April Fourth, 1945, United States Army units from the 89th Infantry Division and the Fourth Armored Division seized Ohrdruf, the first of many Nazi concentration camps to be liberated in Germany. In the weeks that followed, as more camps were discovered, thousands of soldiers came face to face with the monstrous reality of Hitler's Germany. These men discovered the very depths of human-imposed cruelty and depravity.