History Ages

Robots may one day rule the world, but what is a robot-ruled Earth like? Many think the first truly smart robots will be brain emulations, or ems. Scan a human brain, then run a model with the same connections on a fast computer, and you have a robot brain, but recognizably human. Train an em to do some job and copy it a million times; an army of workers is at your disposal. When they can be made cheaply, within perhaps a century, ems will displace humans in most jobs.

Tom Cheke's world is turned upside down when he is kidnapped from his home by Barbary corsairs during an audacious night raid. Sold into slavery in 17th-century Algiers, Tom carves out a promising, new life only to have it shattered once more. Another twist of fate throws him into the hands of a Scottish knight of the Order of St John and into a turbulent world of ciphers, spies, and assassinations.

Despite his promising start as a young man, by his early 50s Chester A. Arthur was known as the crooked crony of New York machine boss Roscoe Conkling. For years Arthur had been perceived as unfit to govern, not only by critics and the vast majority of his fellow citizens but by his own conscience. As President James A. Garfield struggled for his life, Arthur knew better than his detractors that he failed to meet the high standard a president must uphold. And yet, from the moment President Arthur took office, he proved to be not just honest but brave.

By the time of his assassination in 1963, John F. Kennedy stood at the helm of the greatest power the world had ever seen, a booming American nation that he had steered through some of the most perilous diplomatic standoffs of the Cold War. Born in 1917 to a striving Irish American family that had become among Boston’s wealthiest, Kennedy knew political ambition from an early age, and his meteoric rise to become the youngest elected president cemented his status as one of the most mythologized figures in American history.

Born to a poor couple who were tenant farmers on a plantation in Mississippi, Anne Moody lived through some of the most dangerous days of the pre-civil rights era in the South. The week before she began high school came the news of Emmet Till's lynching. Before then, she had "known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was…the fear of being killed just because I was black." In that moment was born the passion for freedom and justice that would change her life.

William Shakespeare may have been the greatest playwright in the English language, but how does he measure up as a historian? In this brilliant comparison between the events and characters in Shakespeare's history plays and the actual events that inspired them, acclaimed historian John Julius Norwich examines the nine works that together amount to an epic masterpiece on England's most fascinating period.

Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution.

Weakness has always been a concern for William Miller. Growing up vegetarian in a family of bodybuilders will do that to a person. But William is further weakened by the death of his mother, the arrival of a new stepmother, and his irrepressible crush on his new stepsister, Lulu. As Lulu faces down her own challenges, William watches his life shift into tumult and despair. Once Lulu departs for college, Will goes into the world to find himself....

Imagine a world where your brain can be interrogated to learn your political beliefs, your thoughts can be used as evidence of a crime, and your own feelings can be held against you. A world where people who suffer from epilepsy receive alerts moments before a seizure, and the average person can peer into their own mind to eliminate painful memories or cure addictions.

For centuries, the Crusades have been central to the story of the medieval Near East, but these religious wars are only part of the region's complex history. As The Mongol Storm reveals, during the same era the Near East was utterly remade by another series of wars: the Mongol invasions. In a single generation, the Mongols conquered vast swaths of the Near East and upended the region's geopolitics. This is the definitive history of the Mongol assault on the Near East and its enduring global consequences.

Slavery was widespread all over Europe during the early Middle Ages and Scandinavians, as Stefan Brink illustrates in this book, became a major player in the northern slave trade. Using a wide variety of source materials, including archaeology, runes, Icelandic sagas, early law, place names, personal names, and not least etymological and semantic analyses of the terminology of slaves, Thraldom provides the most comprehensive survey of slavery in the Viking Age.

The modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet. Acclaimed author Charles R. Morris vividly brings these men and their times to life. The Tycoons tells the incredible story of how these four determined men wrenched the economy into the modern age, inventing a nation of full economic participation that could not have been imagined earlier.

From the 15th to the mid-19th centuries, scurvy caused more deaths at sea than storms, shipwrecks, combat, and all other diseases combined. The cure for scurvy ranks among the greatest of military successes, yet its impact on history has mostly been ignored. In this book, Stephen R. Brown delivers a lively recounting of how three determined individuals overcame the constraints of 18th century thinking to solve the greatest medical mystery of their era. Brimming with tales of ships, sailors, and bureaucracy, Brown presents a vivid picture of life aboard the ship during the age of sail.

Two and a half decades ago, Ascended Master Teachers Arten and Pursah appeared to Gary Renard and held a series of conversations with him that elaborated on the teachings of two spiritual classics, The Gospel of Thomas and A Course in Miracles. Gary immortalized what he learned in the books of his best-selling series. This fourth book, a companion to the original trilogy, explores six of the lifetimes in which the incarnations of Jesus and Buddha lived together, beginning in 700 BC when they were known as Saka and Hiroji.

Giving voice to the voiceless, the Chicago Defender condemned Jim Crow, catalyzed the Great Migration, and focused the electoral power of black America. Robert S. Abbott founded the Defender in 1905, smuggled hundreds of thousands of copies into the most isolated communities in the segregated South, and was dubbed a "Modern Moses", becoming one of the first black millionaires in the process.

In The Normans, Lars Brownworth follows their story, from the first shock of a Viking raid on an Irish monastery to the exile of the last Norman Prince of Antioch. In the process, he brings to vivid life the Norman tapestry's rich cast of characters: figures like Rollo the Walker, William Iron-Arm, Tancred the Monkey King, and Robert Guiscard. The Normans presents a fascinating glimpse of a time when a group of restless adventurers had the world at their fingertips.

The Behind the scenes Story of the network that Shaped a generation. SLIMED! is the first oral history to chronicle the surprisingly complex, wonderfully nostalgic, and impressively compelling story of Nickelodeon, the first kids’ network. Beginning as a DIY start-up in the late seventies, the network forged ahead through the early eighties with a tiny band of young artists and filmmakers, transforming itself into a cultural force in the late eighties and nineties that would change everything about cable television, television in general, animation, and children’s entertainment.

This pamphlet offers a condensed history of Europe between the fall of the Roman empire and the twelfth century. The author’s profound anti-clerical bias becomes apparent as he explores the influence of Christianity on a world in which order was maintained by the imposition of violence, and in which the general populace was kept in a state of ignorance and serfdom. He supports his conclusions with quotes from his own translations of documents of the period.

In a provincial town on Lake Constance, Johann basks in the affection of the colorful staff and regulars at the Station Restaurant. Though his parents struggle to make ends meet, around him the world is rich in mystery: the attraction of girls; the power of words and his gift for music; his rivalry with his best friend, Adolf, son of the local Brownshirt leader; a circus that comes to town bringing Anita, whose love he and Adolf compete to win.

This is a cutting-edge tour de force that traces human family life from its origins in Africa over 20 million years ago to the Internet dating sites and bedrooms of today. It's got it all: the copulatory gaze and other natural courting ploys; the who, when, where, and why of adultery; love addictions; Fisher's discovery of four broad chemically based personality styles and what each seeks in romance; the newest data on worldwide (biologically based) patterns of divorce....