Showing results by publisher "University Press Audiobooks" in World

This riveting audiobook takes the listener around the globe and through the centuries to discover how different cultures have sought to combat and treat physical pain. With colorful stories and sometimes frightening anecdotes, Dr. Thomas Dormandy describes a checkered progression of breakthroughs, haphazard experiments, ignorant attitudes, and surprising developments in human efforts to control pain.

In 100 Years of Air Power and Aviation, Robin Higham, regarded by many as the dean of aviation historians, presents a critical history of British, American, Soviet, German, Italian, French, Japanese, and Israeli aviation. He moves easily from theory to concrete example and back again, in the process discussing the social, economic, and political components of air power, the major wars and police actions in which aircraft have been employed, the composition of air forces, and the creation of aviation industries.

For centuries travelers have been drawn to the stunning and mysterious Dead Sea and Jordan River, a region that is unlike any other on earth in its religious and historical significance. In this exceptionally engaging book, Barbara Kreiger chronicles the natural and human history of these storied bodies of water, drawing on accounts by travelers, pilgrims, and explorers from ancient times to the present.

History and geography delineate the operation of power, not only its range but also the capacity to plan and the ability to implement. Approaching state strategy and policy from the spatial angle, Jeremy Black argues that just as the perception of power is central to issues of power, so place, and its constraints and relationships, is partly a matter of perception, not merely map coordinates. Geopolitics, he maintains, is as much about ideas and perception as it is about the actual spatial dimensions of power.

In We Could Perceive No Sign of Them: Failed Colonies in North America, 1526-1689, historians David MacDonald and Raine Waters tell the fascinating stories of the many attempts to establish a European foothold in the New World, from the first Spanish colony in 1526 on the coast of Georgia to the final disastrous French endeavors near the arctic.

In 1826, when the story begins, the region was claimed by both Mexico and the United States. Neither country knew much about the lands crossed by such rivers as the Guadalupe, Brazos, Nueces, Trinity, and Rio Grande. Jean Louis Berlandier, a French naturalist, was part of a team sent out by the Mexican Boundary Commission to explore the area. His role was to collect specimens of flora and fauna and to record detailed observations of the landscapes and peoples through which the exploring party traveled.

In 1784, when Americans first voyaged to China, they confronted Chinese authorities who were unaware that the United States even existed. Nevertheless, a long, complicated, and fruitful trade relationship was born after American traders, missionaries, diplomats, and others sailed to China with lofty ambitions: to acquire fabulous wealth, convert China to Christianity, and even command a Chinese army. In America's First Adventure in China, John Haddad provides a colourful history of the evolving cultural exchange and interactions between these countries.

Humanity has used asphalt for thousands of years. This humble hydrocarbon may have glued the first arrowhead to the first shaft, but the changes wrought by this material are most dramatic since its emergence as pavement. Since the 1920s the automobile and blacktop have allowed unprecedented numbers of Americans to experience the beauty of their continent from the Adirondacks to the Rockies and beyond, to Big Sur and the Pacific Coast Highway.

On their journey westward, Lewis and Clark demonstrated an amazing ability to identify the new plants and animals they encountered, and their observations enriched science's understanding of the trans-Mississippi West. Others have written about their discoveries and have faithfully cataloged their findings; now a 21st-century biologist reexamines some of those discoveries in the light of modern science to show for the first time their lasting biological significance.

In July 1994, Thomas P. Odom was part of the U.S. Embassy team that responded to the Goma refugee crisis. He witnessed the deaths of 70,000 refugees in a single week. In the previous three months of escalating violence, the Rwandan genocide had claimed 800,000 dead. Now, in this vivid and unsettling new book, Odom offers the first insider look at these devastating events before, during, and after the genocide.

Author Bob Wodnik has masterfully compiled the stories of several World War II prisoners-of-war into a non-fiction historical work with the feel of a novel. Listeners glimpse the unrelenting physical agony and mental anguish of these young heroes as they struggle for survival, and then, following years of captivity, make the difficult and awkward return to civilization.

In Nature and Culture in the Early Modern Atlantic, historian Peter C. Mancall reveals how Europeans and Native Americans thought about a natural world undergoing rapid change in the century following the historic voyages of Christopher Columbus. Through innovative use of oral history and folklore maintained for centuries by Native Americans as well as original use of manuscript atlases, paintings that depict European representations of nature, and texts that circulated across the ocean, he reveals how the encounter between the old world and the new changed the fate of millions.

What if there had been no World War I or no Russian Revolution? What if Napoleon had won at Waterloo in 1815, or if Martin Luther had not nailed his complaints to the church door at Wittenberg in 1517, or if the South had won the American Civil War? Black focuses on the role of counterfactualism in demonstrating the part of contingency, and thus human agency, in history, and the salutary critique the approach offers to determinist accounts of past, present, and future.

In the early 1970s, as US combat forces began to withdraw from Southeast Asia, South Vietnamese and Cambodian forces continued the fight against the People's Army of Vietnam and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, more commonly known as the Viet Cong. Despite the evacuation of its ground troops, the United States promised to materially support its allies' struggle against communist aggression.

In The Triumph of Improvisation, James Graham Wilson takes a long view of the end of the Cold War, from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 to Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. Drawing on deep archival research and recently declassified papers, Wilson argues that adaptation, improvisation, and engagement by individuals in positions of power ended the specter of a nuclear holocaust.

Pacific Blitzkrieg closely examines the planning, preparation, and execution of ground operations for five major invasions in the Central Pacific. Sharon Tosi Lacey makes extensive use of previously untapped primary research material to re-examine the development of joint ground operations, the rapid transformation of tactics and equipment, and the evolution of command relationships between army and marine leadership.

Africa supplies the majority of the world's diamonds, yet consumers generally know little about the origins and history of these precious stones beyond sensationalized media accounts of so-called blood diamonds.

Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims.

In its formative years, America, birthplace of a revolution, wrestled with a volatile dilemma. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and many other founding fathers clashed. What was to be the new republic's strategy toward a revolution roiling just off its shores? From 1790 to 1810, the disagreement reverberated far beyond Caribbean waters and American coastal ports. War between France and Britain, the great powers of the time, raged on the seas and in Europe.

Historian Michael Warner addresses the birth of professional intelligence in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century and the subsequent rise of US intelligence during the Cold War. He brings this history up to the present day as intelligence agencies used the struggle against terrorism and the digital revolution to improve capabilities in the 2000s.