An Interview with Author Jack Weatherford

The Secret History of the Mongol Queens: How the Daughters of Genghis Khan Rescued His Empire

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 19 mins)
• By Jack Weatherford
• Narrated By Robertson Dean
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The Mongol queens of the 13th century ruled the largest empire the world has ever known. Yet sometime near the end of the century, censors cut a section from The Secret History of the Mongols, leaving a single tantalizing quote from Genghis Khan: “Let us reward our female offspring.” Only this hint of a father’s legacy for his daughters remained of a much larger story.

Genghis Khan and the Quest for God: How the World's Greatest Conqueror Gave Us Religious Freedom

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 43 mins)
• By Jack Weatherford
• Narrated By Mark Bramhall
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Throughout history the world's greatest conquerors have made their mark not just on the battlefield but in the societies they have transformed. Genghis Khan conquered by arms and bravery, but he ruled by commerce and religion. He created the world's greatest trading network and drastically lowered taxes for merchants, but he knew that if his empire was going to last, he would need something stronger and more binding than trade. He needed religion.

Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 19 mins)
• By Jack Weatherford
• Narrated By Jonathan Davis, Jack Weatherford
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The Mongol army led by Genghis Khan subjugated more lands and people in 25 years than the Romans did in 400. In nearly every country the Mongols conquered, they brought an unprecedented rise in cultural communication, expanded trade, and a blossoming of civilization.

Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Jack Weatherford
• Narrated By Victor Bevine
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After 500 years, the world's huge debt to the wisdom of the Indians of the Americas has finally been explored in all its vivid drama by anthropologist Jack Weatherford. He traces the crucial contributions made by the Indians to our federal system of government, our democratic institutions, modern medicine, agriculture, architecture, and ecology, and in this astonishing, ground-breaking book takes a giant step toward recovering a true American history.

The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 28 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Robert Garland
• Narrated By Professor Robert Garland

Look beyond the abstract dates and figures, kings and queens, and battles and wars that make up so many historical accounts. Over the course of 48 richly detailed lectures, Professor Garland covers the breadth and depth of human history from the perspective of the so-called ordinary people, from its earliest beginnings through the Middle Ages.

Marco Polo

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 29 mins)
• By Laurence Bergreen
• Narrated By Paul Boehmer
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As the most celebrated European to explore Asia, Marco Polo was the original global traveler and the earliest bridge between East and West. A universal icon of adventure and discovery, he has inspired six centuries of popular fascination and spurious mythology. Now, from acclaimed author Laurence Bergreen, comes the first fully authoritative biography of one of the most enchanting figures in world history.

Richard Nixon: The Life

• UNABRIDGED (28 hrs and 37 mins)
• By John A. Farrell
• Narrated By Dan Woren

Richard Nixon opens with young navy lieutenant "Nick" Nixon returning from the Pacific and setting his cap at Congress, an idealistic dreamer seeking to build a better world. Yet amid the turns of that now legendary 1946 campaign, Nixon's finer attributes quickly gave way to unapologetic ruthlessness. It is a stunning overture to John A. Farrell's magisterial portrait of a man who embodied postwar American cynicism.

In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 11 mins)
• By Tom Holland
• Narrated By Steven Crossley
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The evolution of the Arab empire is one of the supreme narratives of ancient history, a story dazzlingly rich in drama, character, and achievement. In this exciting and sweeping history - the third in his trilogy of books on the ancient world - Tom Holland describes how the Arabs emerged to carve out a stupefyingly vast dominion in a matter of decades, overcoming seemingly insuperable odds to create an imperial civilization.

The Foundations of Western Civilization

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 54 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Thomas F. X. Noble

What is Western Civilization? According to Professor Noble, it is "much more than human and political geography," encompassing myriad forms of political and institutional structures - from monarchies to participatory republics - and its own traditions of political discourse. It involves choices about who gets to participate in any given society and the ways in which societies have resolved the tension between individual self-interest and the common good.

Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the West

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 52 mins)
• By Tom Holland
• Narrated By Michael Page
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In the fifth century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold, and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece. The story of how their citizens took on the Great King of Persia, and thereby saved not only themselves, but Western civilization as well, is as heart-stopping and fateful as any episode in history.

On the Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads

• UNABRIDGED (18 hrs and 39 mins)
• By Tim Cope
• Narrated By Philip Rose
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Guided by a Kazakh aphorism - "To understand the wolf, you must put the skin of a wolf on and look through its eyes" - adventurer Tim Cope undertook a journey not successfully completed since the days of Genghis Khan: He traveled by horseback across the entire length of the Eurasian steppe, from the ancient capital of Mongolia to the Danube River in Hungary.

Being Human: Life Lessons from the Frontiers of Science

• ORIGINAL (5 hrs and 57 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Robert Sapolsky
• Narrated By Professor Robert Sapolsky

Understanding our humanity - the essence of who we are - is one of the deepest mysteries and biggest challenges in modern science. Why do we have bad moods? Why are we capable of having such strange dreams? How can metaphors in our language hold such sway on our actions? As we learn more about the mechanisms of human behavior through evolutionary biology, neuroscience, anthropology, and other related fields, we're discovering just how intriguing the human species is.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

• UNABRIDGED (24 hrs and 17 mins)
• By Peter Frankopan
• Narrated By Laurence Kennedy

It was on the Silk Roads that East and West first encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas, cultures, and religions, and it was the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the emergence of Greece and Rome to the depredations by the Mongols, the transmission of the Black Death, the struggles of the Great Game, and the fall of Communism - the fate of the West has always been inextricably linked to the East.

The History of Money

• UNABRIDGED (10 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Jack Weatherford
• Narrated By Victor Bevine
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From primitive man's cowrie shells to the electronic cash card, from the markets of Timbuktu to the New York Stock Exchange, The History of Money explores how money and the myriad forms of exchange have affected humanity, and how they will continue to shape all aspects of our lives--economic, political, and personal.

The American Civil War

• ORIGINAL (24 hrs and 36 mins)
• By The Great Courses, Gary W. Gallagher
• Narrated By Professor Gary W. Gallagher

Between 1861 and 1865, the clash of the greatest armies the Western hemisphere had ever seen turned small towns, little-known streams, and obscure meadows in the American countryside into names we will always remember. In those great battles, those streams ran red with blood-and the United States was truly born.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

• UNABRIDGED (126 hrs and 31 mins)
• By Edward Gibbon
• Narrated By Charlton Griffin

Here in a single volume is the entire, unabridged recording of Gibbon's masterpiece. Beginning in the second century A.D. at the apex of the Pax Romana, Gibbon traces the arc of decline and complete destruction through the centuries across Europe and the Mediterranean. It is a thrilling and cautionary tale of splendor and ruin, of faith and hubris, and of civilization and barbarism. Follow along as Christianity overcomes paganism... before itself coming under intense pressure from Islam.

The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History

• UNABRIDGED (17 hrs and 50 mins)
• By Paul Andrew Hutton
• Narrated By Jonathan Yen

They called him Mickey Free. His kidnapping started the longest war in American history, and both sides - the Apaches and the white invaders - blamed him for it. A mixed-blood warrior who moved uneasily between the worlds of the Apaches and the American soldiers, he was never trusted by either but desperately needed by both. He was the only man Geronimo ever feared. He played a pivotal role in this long war for the desert Southwest from its beginning in 1861 until its end in 1890 with his pursuit of the renegade scout Apache Kid.

A Little History of Philosophy

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Nigel Warburton
• Narrated By Kris Dyer
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Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it.