History Ages

Shortly after Emperor Hadrian came to power in the early second century CE, he decided to seal off Scotland from Roman Britain with an ambitious wall stretching from sea to sea. The sheer scale of Hadrian’s Wall still impresses people today, but as the Western Roman Empire collapsed in the late fifth century, Hadrian’s Wall was abandoned and Roman control of the area broke down. Little is known of this period of British history, but soon the Anglo-Saxons showed up and began to settle the land, creating a patchwork of little kingdoms and starting a new era of British history.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Rocket Men and the award-winning biographer of Thomas Paine comes the first complete history of the Atomic Age, a brilliant, magisterial account of the men and women who uncovered the secrets of the nucleus, brought its power to America, and ignited the 20th century.

As 1909 dawned, the greatest jewels of exploration - set at the world's frozen extremes - lay unclaimed: the North and South Poles and the so-called "Third Pole", the pole of altitude, located in unexplored heights of the Himalaya. Before the calendar turned, three expeditions had faced death, mutiny, and the harshest conditions on the planet to plant flags at the furthest edges of the Earth.

In The Age of Reagan, Sean Wilentz offers a fresh, brilliant chronicle of America's political history since the fall of Nixon. The past 35 years have marked an era of conservatism. Although briefly interrupted in the late 1970s and temporarily reversed in the 1990s, a powerful surge from the Right has dominated American politics and government.

The early history of our planet covers such vast stretches of time that years, centuries, and even millennia become virtually meaningless. Instead paleontologists and scientists who study geochronology divide time into periods and eras. The current view of science is that planet Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. The first four billion years of its development are known as the Precambrian period. For the first billion years or so, there was no life in Earth. Then the first single-celled life-forms, early bacteria and algae, began to emerge.

Gazing at the stars, falling in love, or listening to music, we sometimes feel a transcendent connection with a cosmic unity and things larger than ourselves. But these experiences are not easily understood by science, which holds that all things can be explained in terms of atoms and molecules. Is there space in our scientific worldview for these spiritual experiences?

The Untold History of Healing takes the listener on an exciting, expansive journey of the history of medicine from the Stone Age to modern times, explaining that Western medicine has its true origins in the healing lore of Paleolithic hunters and gatherers, herding nomads, and the early sedentary farmers rather than in the academic tradition of doctors and pharmacists.

From facial recognition—capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn't just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.

1399: Constance of York, Lady Despenser, proves herself more than a mere observer in the devious intrigues of her magnificently dysfunctional family, the House of York. Surrounded by power-hungry men, including her aggressively self-centred husband, Thomas, and ruthless siblings, Edward and Richard, Constance places herself at the heart of two treasonous plots against King Henry IV. Will it be possible for this Plantagenet family to safeguard its own political power by restoring either King Richard II to the throne, or the precarious Mortimer claimant?

Tough, spirited, and fiercely independent Abigail is brought as a teenager to London from Nigeria by relatives who attempt to force her into prostitution. She flees, struggling to find herself in the shadow of a strong but dead mother. In spare yet haunting and lyrical prose reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, Abani brings to life a young woman who lives with a strength and inner light that will enlighten and uplift the listener.

What happened when a wealthy industrialist and a visionary evangelist unleashed forces that joined to subjugate an entire continent? Historians Gerard Colby and Charlotte Dennett tell the story of the 40-year campaign led by Standard Oil scion Nelson Rockefeller and Wycliffe Bible Translators founder William Cameron Townsend to establish a US imperial beachhead in Central and South America.

As a pastor in Silicon Valley, Jay Kim has experienced the digital church in all its splendor. In Analog Church, he grapples with the ramifications of a digital church, from our worship and experience of Christian community to the way we engage Scripture and sacrament. Could it be that in our efforts to stay relevant in our digital age, we've begun to give away the very thing that our age most desperately needs: transcendence? Could it be that the best way to reach new generations is in fact found in a more timeless path?

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.

A lyrical coming-of-age story set in the 1960s, Hot Fudge Sundae Blues is an extraordinary companion to Bev Marshall's first two novels, Walking Through Shadows and Right as Rain. Here again she mines the territory of the small town of Zebulon, Mississippi, where even the most seemingly ordinary folks harbor well-disguised heartaches and intricate secrets.

Even when he was a kid, Albert Einstein did things his own way. He thought in pictures instead of words, and his special way of thinking helped him understand big ideas like the structure of music and why a compass always points north. Those ideas made him want to keep figuring out the secrets of the universe. Other people thought he was just a dreamer, but because of his curiosity, Einstein grew up to be one of the greatest scientists the world has ever known.

From designers to engineers, and even communication specialists and the builders who assembled these towering rockets, hundreds of thousands of people worked on getting humans to the moon, yet only a few have been recognized for their contributions. George D. Morgan sets the record straight by giving these forgotten figures of space travel their due.

For Coming of Age, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Peabody Award-winning radio host Studs Terkel - himself an octogenarian - interviewed several very different men and women ranging in age from 70 to 99. Some are powerful celebrities (Maggie Kuhn of the Grey Panthers, economist John Kenneth Galbraith); others are obscure people in small towns. Together they represent an extraordinary panorama of American life and work throughout this century and the ways in which the times have changed.

Thirteen-year-old Huck runs away from his alcoholic and abusive father in a stolen canoe. Hiding on a wooded island, he comes upon a slave named Jim, who is also fleeing--from slavery. The two set off down the Mississippi on a piece of a raft, each in search of his own kind of freedom.

Set in the early 1990s, Ashley Little's follow-up to her award-winning novel Anatomy of a Girl Gang introduces listeners to 11-year-old Tucker Malone - the only child of a narcoleptic touring stripper - who believes his father is Sam Malone, the Boston barkeep who regularly appears on Tucker's TV screen. He and his mother move from motel to motel until, one night in Niagara Falls, his mother is hit by a car after falling asleep in the street.

On November 12, 1588, five young Asian men—led by a twenty-one-year-old called Christopher—traveled up the River Thames to meet Queen Elizabeth I. Christopher’s epic sea voyage had spanned from Japan, via the Philippines, New Spain (Mexico), Java and Southern Africa. On the way, he had already become the first recorded Japanese person in North America. Now Christopher was the first ever Japanese visitor to England, and no other would leave such a legacy for centuries to come.