What If? Part 3: Ancient Wars that Shaped Our World

Who Killed Homer?: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom

• UNABRIDGED (11 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath
• Narrated By Jeff Riggenbach

For over two millennia in the West, familiarity with the literature, philosophy, and values of the Classical World has been synonymous with education itself. The traditions of the Greeks explain why Western Culture’s unique tenets of democracy, capitalism, civil liberty, and constitutional government are now sweeping the globe. Yet the general public in America knows less about its cultural origins than ever before, as Classical education rapidly disappears from our high school and university curricula.

Team Yankee: A Novel of World War III

• UNABRIDGED (12 hrs and 13 mins)
• By Harold Coyle
• Narrated By James Patrick Cronin
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Team Yankee, the New York Times best-seller by Harold Coyle, presents a glimpse of what it would have been like for the soldiers who would have had to meet the relentless onslaught of Soviet and Warsaw Pact divisions. Using the geo-political and military scenarios described by General Sir John Hackett, former NORTHAG commander and author of World War Three; August 1985, Team Yankee follows the war as seen from the turret of Captain Sean Bannon's tank.

The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

• UNABRIDGED (25 hrs and 32 mins)
• By Thomas Asbridge
• Narrated By Derek Perkins
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge - a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker) - covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this big, ambitious, listenable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe: 1815-1914

• UNABRIDGED (41 hrs and 37 mins)
• By Richard J. Evans
• Narrated By Napoleon Ryan
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Richard J. Evans's gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. The first single-volume history of the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the listener a magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the rest of the globe.

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.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

• ORIGINAL (18 hrs and 22 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Ken Albala

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn

• UNABRIDGED (16 hrs and 19 mins)
• By Daniel Gordis
• Narrated By Fred Sanders

Israel is a tiny state, and yet it has captured the world's attention, aroused its imagination, and, lately, been the object of its opprobrium. Why does such a small country speak to so many global concerns? More pressingly: Why does Israel make the decisions it does? And what lies in its future? We cannot answer these questions until we understand Israel's people and the questions and conflicts, the hopes and desires, that have animated their conversations and actions.

The Last Punisher: A SEAL Team Three Sniper's True Account of the Battle of Ramadi

• UNABRIDGED (8 hrs and 57 mins)
• By Kevin Lacz, Ethan E. Rocke, Lincy Lacz
• Narrated By Timothy Phillips
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The Last Punisher is a bold, no-holds-barred first-person account of the Iraq War. With wry humor and moving testimony, Kevin Lacz tells the story of his tour in Iraq with SEAL Team Three, the warrior elite of the navy. This legendary unit, known as The Punishers, included Chris Kyle (American Sniper), Mike Monsoor, Ryan Job, and Marc Lee. These brave men were instrumental in securing the key locations in the pivotal 2006 Battle of Ramadi, told with stunning detail in this book.

Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War

• UNABRIDGED (21 hrs and 10 mins)
• By Karl Marlantes
• Narrated By Bronson Pinchot
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Why we think it’s a great listen: A performance so poignant, we gave Bronson Pinchot (yes, Balki from Perfect Strangers) our inaugural Narrator of the Year award.... In the monsoon season of 1968-69 at a fire support base called Matterhorn, located in the remote mountains of Vietnam, a young and ambitious Marine lieutenant wants to command a company to further his civilian political ambitions. But two people stand in his way.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

• UNABRIDGED (27 hrs and 2 mins)
• By Jared Diamond
• Narrated By Michael Prichard
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.

Blitzkrieg: Myth, Reality, and Hitler's Lightning War: France 1940

• UNABRIDGED (13 hrs and 35 mins)
• By Lloyd Clark
• Narrated By Shaun Grindell
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

In the spring of 1940, the Germans launched a military offensive in France and the Low Countries that married superb intelligence, the latest military thinking, and new technology. It was a stunning victory, altering the balance of power in Europe in one stroke, and convincing the entire world that the Nazi war machine was unstoppable. But as Lloyd Clark, a leading British military historian and academic, argues, much of our understanding of this victory, and blitzkrieg itself, is based on myth.

History's Great Military Blunders and the Lessons They Teach

• ORIGINAL (12 hrs and 12 mins)
• By The Great Courses
• Narrated By Professor Gregory S. Aldrete, PhD

Military history often highlights successes and suggests a sense of inevitability about victory, but there is so much that can be gleaned from considering failures. Study these crucibles of history to gain a better understanding of why a civilization took - or didn't take - a particular path.

A History of Warfare

• UNABRIDGED (19 hrs and 12 mins)
• By John Keegan
• Narrated By Frederick Davidson
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

Starting with the premise that all civilizations owe their origins to warmaking, Keegan probes the meanings, motivations, and methods underlying war in different societies over the course of more than two thousand years. Following the progress of human aggression in its full historical sweep, from the strangely ritualistic combat of Stone Age peoples to the warfare of mass destruction in the present age, his illuminating and lively narrative gives us all the world's great warrior cultures.

The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll Through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

• UNABRIDGED (7 hrs and 1 min)
• By Mark Forsyth
• Narrated By Don Hagen

The Etymologicon is a completely unauthorized guide to the strange underpinnings of the English language. It explains: How you get from “gruntled” to “disgruntled”; why you are absolutely right to believe that your meager salary barely covers “money for salt”; how the biggest chain of coffee shops in the world (hint: Seattle) connects to whaling in Nantucket; and what precisely the Rolling Stones have to do with gardening.

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.

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

• UNABRIDGED (14 hrs and 25 mins)
• By P. W. Singer, August Cole
• Narrated By Rich Orlow
• Whispersync for Voice-ready

The year is 2026. China has taken over as the world's largest economy, while the United States, mired in an oil shortage, struggles to adjust to its diminished role. Then, a surprise attack throws the US into a chaos unseen since Pearl Harbor. As the enemy takes control, the survival of the nation will depend upon the most unlikely forces: the Navy's antiquated Ghost Fleet and a cadre of homegrown terrorists.

The Peloponnesian War

• UNABRIDGED (26 hrs and 18 mins)
• By Thucydides
• Narrated By Charlton Griffin

Historians universally agree that Thucydides was the greatest historian who has ever lived, and that his story of the Peloponnesian conflict is a marvel of forensic science and fine literature. That such a triumph of intellectual accomplishment was created at the end of the fifth century B.C. in Greece is, perhaps, not so surprising, given the number of original geniuses we find in that period. But that such an historical work would also be simultaneously acknowledged as a work of great literature and a penetrating ethical evaluation of humanity is one of the miracles of ancient history.

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.