History

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize David McCullough tells the dramatic story behind the story about the courageous brothers who taught the world how to fly....

Ignition! is the story of the Cold War era search for a rocket propellant that could be trusted to take man into space. A favorite of Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, listeners will want to tune into this "really good book on rocket[s]," available for the first time in audio....

Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet....

Thunderstruck tells the stories of two men: Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication....

The phenomenal true story of the Black female mathematicians at NASA whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space....

The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann....

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America's manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades....

In April 1956, a refitted oil tanker carried 58 shipping containers from Newark to Houston....

From Paleolithic flax to 3D knitting, explore the global history of textiles and the world they weave together in this enthralling and educational guide....

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943), credited as the inspiration for radio, robots, and even radar, has been called the patron saint of modern electricity....

La biografía definitiva de Steve Jobs, el fundador de Apple, escrita con su colaboración....

Clarence L. "Kelly" Johnson led the design of such crucial aircraft as the P-38 and Constellation, but he will be more remembered for the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes. His extraordinary leadership of the Lockheed "Skunk Works" cemented his reputation....

From a preeminent historian of Eastern Europe, the definitive history of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster....

In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the 1980s....

The best-selling author traces the development of technology from the Industrial Age to the Digital Age to explore the single component crucial to advancement - precision - in a superb history....

Deborah Blum, writing with the high style and skill for suspense that is characteristic of the very best mystery fiction, shares the untold story of how poison rocked Jazz Age New York City....

Innovation is the main event of the modern age, the reason we experience both dramatic improvements in our living standards and unsettling changes in our society.... 

This book conveys every aspect of the Apollo missions with breathtaking immediacy and stunning detail....

Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest, most respected, and most famous American hacking group of all time. Though until now it has remained mostly anonymous, its members invented the concept of hacktivism....

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: A revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern era’s defining quality....

Creative Selection recounts the life of one of the few who worked behind the scenes, a highly respected software engineer who worked in the final years of the Steve Jobs era - the Golden Age of Apple....

Best-selling author and time-travel enthusiast Ryan North tells you how to invent all the modern conveniences we take for granted - from first principles....

In the gripping Never Panic Early, Fred Haise, Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 13, offers a detailed firsthand account of when disaster struck three days into his mission to the moon....

In the weird glow of the dying millennium, Michael Lewis sets out on a safari through Silicon Valley to find the world's most important technology entrepreneur....

David K. Stumpf demystifies the intercontinental ballistic missile program that was conceived at the end of the Eisenhower administration as a key component of the US nuclear strategy of massive retaliation....

One Day at a Time explores 365 moments in human history, from the development of writing through the 21st century. These snapshots into the past capture the evolution of technology, the increasing connections between distant lands, and the individual triumphs that make history so fascinating.

In the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel, Enlightenment Now, and Sapiens, Michael Magoon shows us that by learning from the past, we can let go of our negative attitudes about the present, and change our world for the better. For virtually all of history, humanity was trapped in poverty by geographical constraints. Fortunately for us, a few societies invented the five keys to progress (productive agriculture, cities, decentralization of power, export industries, and fossil fuels), laying the foundations for our current progress. 

The Great Digital Convergence of all media types into one universal digital medium occurred, with little fanfare, at the recent turn of the millennium. The bit became the universal medium, and the pixel conquered the world. Henceforward, nearly every picture in the world would be composed of pixels. In A Biography of the Pixel, Pixar cofounder Alvy Ray Smith argues that the pixel is the organizing principle of most modern media, and he presents a few simple but profound ideas that unify the dazzling varieties of digital image making.

Historian Thomas J. Misa's sweeping history of the relationship between technology and society over the past 500 years reveals how technological innovations have shaped—and have been shaped by—the cultures in which they arose. In this edition, Misa brings his acclaimed text up to date by drawing on current scholarship while retaining sharply drawn portraits of individual people, artifacts, and systems. A masterful analysis of technology and culture, Leonardo to the Internet frames a history that illuminates modern-day problems and prospects of a technology-dependent world.

No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn't always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. The Mercenary River tells the story of that struggle from the Middle Ages to the present day. Based on new research, it tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs, but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. 

The modern world has the ancient Romans to thank for the origins of many modern technologies, conveniences, and ideas, from running water, baths, and republican-style government to roads. Similarly, by the third century BCE, the Romans were prodigious monument builders, so much so that the memory of the great Roman Republic and the Roman Empire continues to exist within a cityscape of stone. Rome’s public spaces were filled with statues, arches, temples, and many other varieties of monumental images, and each of these structures had its own civic or religious function.

In the gripping Never Panic Early, Fred Haise, Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 13, offers a detailed firsthand account of when disaster struck three days into his mission to the moon. An oxygen tank exploded, a crewmate uttered the now iconic words, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here,” and the world anxiously watched as one of history’s most incredible rescue missions unfolded. Haise brings listeners into the heart of his experience on the challenging mission—considered NASA’s finest hour—and reflects on his life and career as an Apollo astronaut.

Matthew Crain gives internet surveillance a much-needed origin story by chronicling the development of its most important historical catalyst: web advertising. Profit over Privacy uses the 1990s as its backdrop to show how the massive data-collection infrastructure that undergirds the internet today is the result of twenty-five years of technical and political economic engineering. 

Alan Meckler was the first person to start a venture in the commercial internet space in October, 1990. There were few means to connect to the internet back then. Yet Meckler anticipated that the internet would be a "black swan event" and that it would revolutionize all aspects of personal and commercial life. The book is a history, but also a very personal memoir of a career entrepreneur and all the difficulties one encounters with raising funds, dealing with cash flow shortages, personnel, and getting people to believe in the next big thing. 

More than any other technology, cars have transformed our culture. Cars have created vast wealth as well as novel dreams of freedom and mobility. They have transformed our sense of distance and made the world infinitely more available to our eyes and our imaginations. They have inspired cinema, music and literature; they have, by their need for roads, bridges, filling stations, huge factories and global supply chains, re-engineered the world.