Birth History

From evolution to the epidural and beyond, Tina Cassidy presents an intelligent, enlightening, and impeccably researched cultural history of how and why we're born the way we are. Women have been giving birth for millennia, but that's about the only constant in the final stage of the great process that is human reproduction. Why is it that every culture and generation seems to have its own ideas about the best way to give birth?

The English-speaking peoples comprise perhaps the greatest number of human beings sharing a common language in the world today. These people also share a common heritage. For his four-volume work, Sir Winston Churchill took as his subject these great elements in world history. Volume 1 commences in 55BC, when Julius Caesar famously "turned his gaze upon Britain" and concludes with the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.

Civilization was born 8,000 years ago, between the floodplains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, when migrants from the surrounding mountains and deserts began to create increasingly sophisticated urban societies. In the cities that they built, half of human history took place. In Babylon, Paul Kriwaczek tells the story of Mesopotamia from the earliest settlements seven thousand years ago to the eclipse of Babylon in the sixth century BCE. Bringing the people of this land to life in vibrant detail, the author chronicles the rise and fall of power during this period.

To an extraordinary extent we continue to live in the shadow of the classical world. At every level, from languages to calendars to political systems, we are the descendants of a “classical Europe,” using frames of reference created by ancient Mediterranean cultures. As this consistently fresh and surprising new audio book makes clear, however, this was no less true for the inhabitants of those classical civilizations themselves, whose myths, history, and buildings were an elaborate engagement with an already old and revered past - one filled with great leaders and writers....

In August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after WWII.

Here is the epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 - Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Dolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde - and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood and America forever.

In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe.

The Great War of 1914-1918 burst on the European scene with a brutality to mankind not yet witnessed by the civilized world. Modern warfare was no longer the stuff of chivalry and honor; it was a mutilative, deadly, and humbling exercise to wipe out the very presence of humanity. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of maimed, beaten, and bleeding men surged into aid stations and hospitals with injuries unimaginable in their scope and destruction. Doctors scrambled to find some way to salvage not only life but limb.

Popular consensus says that the US rose over two centuries to Cold War victory and world domination, and is now in slow decline. But is this right? History's great civilizations have always lasted much longer, and for all its colossal power, American culture was overshadowed by Europe until recently. What if this isn't the end? In History Has Begun, Bruno Maçães offers a compelling vision of America's future, both fascinating and unnerving. From the early American Republic, he takes us to the turbulent present, when, he argues, America is finally forging its own path.

Beginning with the life of Jesus, Robert Louis Wilken narrates the dramatic spread and development of Christianity over the first thousand years of its history. Moving through the formation of early institutions, practices, and beliefs to the transformations of the Roman world after the conversion of Constantine, he sheds new light on the subsequent stories of Christianity in the Latin West, the Byzantine and Slavic East, the Middle East, and Central Asia.

A landmark release, this is the first of a two-volume biography of Metallica, the biggest metal band of all time, told via exclusive interviews with the band and their world.

In 1960 President Eisenhower was focused on Laos, a tiny Southeast Asian nation few Americans had ever heard of. Washington feared the country would fall to Communism, triggering a domino effect in the rest of Southeast Asia. So in January 1961, Eisenhower approved the CIA's Operation Momentum, a plan to create a proxy army of ethnic Hmong to fight Communist forces in Laos. While remaining hidden from the American public and most of Congress, Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States.

The tenth century dawned in violence and disorder. Charlemagne’s empire was in ruins, most of Spain had been claimed by Moorish invaders, and even the papacy in Rome was embroiled in petty, provincial conflicts. To many historians, it was a prime example of the ignorance and uncertainty of the Dark Ages. Yet according to historian Paul Collins, the story of the tenth century is the story of our culture’s birth, of the emergence of our civilization into the light of day.

Unleash your inner Einstein with the most exhiliarating, laugh-out-loud trivia book ever written! Be catapulted on a whirlwind adventure through the zany, weird, and utterly fascinating realms of knowledge, as we take trivia to a whole new level of fun! Packed with 1,522 mind-blowing facts spanning science, history, pop culture, and more, this rip-roaring, side-splitting tome is perfect for trivia buffs and inquisitive minds of all stripes, comprising everything from the astonishing to the absurd, the hilarious to the hair-raising, and everything in between. "Brain-Boosting Facts for ...

The navy created by the people of Athens in ancient Greece was one of the finest fighting forces in the history of the world and the model for all other national navies to come. The Athenian navy built a civilization, empowered the world's first democracy, and led a band of ordinary citizens on a voyage of discovery that altered the course of history.

This is a story of power, set against Puritan America and the English Civil War. Williams's interactions with King James, Francis Bacon, Oliver Cromwell, and his mentor Edward Coke set his course, but his fundamental ideas came to fruition in America, as Williams, though a Puritan, collided with John Winthrop's vision of his "City upon a Hill."

When it appeared in 1670, Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise was denounced as the most dangerous book ever published. In A Book Forged in Hell, Steven Nadler tells the fascinating story of this extraordinary book: its radical claims and their background in the philosophical, religious, and political tensions of the Dutch Golden Age, as well as the vitriolic reaction these ideas inspired.

In The Poisoner's Handbook, Blum draws from highly original research to track the fascinating, perilous days when a pair of forensic scientists began their trailblazing chemical detective work, fighting to end an era when untraceable poisons offered an easy path to the perfect crime.

It was 1786 when Arthur Phillip, an ambitious captain in the Royal Navy, was assigned the formidable task of organizing an expedition to Australia in order to establish a penal colony. With the authority of a renowned historian and the narrative grace of a brilliant novelist, Thomas Keneally offers an insider's perspective into the dramatic saga of the birth of a vibrant society in an unfamiliar land.

Dazzling in its originality, Rites of Spring probes the origins, impact, and aftermath of World War I from the premiere of Stravinsky's ballet "The Rite of Spring" in 1913 to the death of Hitler in 1945. "The Great War", as Modris Eksteins writes, "was the psychological turning point...for modernism as a whole. The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places."