Mostrando resultados por narrador "Bill Hare" en Todas las categorías

Samuel Colt entered the pool of visionaries in search of the invention that would tip the power balance in favor of those who possessed it. Samuel Colt: The Life and Legacy of the Man Who Invented America’s Most Famous Guns looks at the individual and firearms that helped shape the nation in the 19th century.

The 19th century saw the rise of one of the largest, most powerful empires of the modern era. The sun never set on the British Empire, whose holdings spanned the globe, in one form or another. Its naval supremacy linked the Commonwealth of Canada with the colonies in South Africa and India, and through them trade flowed east and west. An integral but underutilized part of this vast trade network included China, a reclusive Asian kingdom closed off from the Western world that desired none of its goods.

The ancient Greeks used a number of forms of divination to determine the future and seek advice from the gods as to which actions they should take in any given situation. The most popular of these ways to consult the Gods was through a visit to an oracle - usually a person - at a fixed shrine. The oldest of these Greek sites was at Dodona in Epirus, and while it continued to be a major oracle for the Greek world through antiquity, it was quickly overtaken by the oracle at Delphi as the most consulted by kings, politicians, and ordinary Greeks alike.

Charles Ponzi’s name is almost instantly recognizable thanks to the famous financial scandal named after him. This is somewhat ironic because, while his last name has become synonymous with financial scandal and many recognize how a Ponzi scheme works, some have argued that Ponzi really did not know what he was doing while it was taking place. Charles Ponzi and the Ponzi Scheme: The History and Legacy of 20th Century America’s Most Famous Con Artist looks at the elaborate fraud designed by one of America’s most notorious criminals.

By the time the Revolutionary War started, military confrontations between the world powers had become so common that combat was raised to the status of a fine art, consuming a large portion of time for adolescent males in training and comprising a sizable component of the economy. Weaponry was developed to a degree of quality not accessible to most North Americans, and European aristocrats were reared in the mastery of swordsmanship with an emphasis on the saber for military use.

The Chisholm Trail: The History and Legacy of 19th Century America's Most Famous Cattle Drive Route examines how the various paths were forged, the people most responsible for them, and the most famous events associated with the trail's history. You will learn about the Chisholm Trail like never before.

Welcome to the Middle East conflict, a conflict that is technically 63 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive concepts, like the right of return, contiguous borders, secure borders, demilitarized zones, and security requirements, with players like the Quartet, Palestinian Authority, Fatah, Hamas, the Arab League, and Israel. Over time, it has become exceedingly difficult for even sophisticated political pundits and followers to keep track of it all.

By 1787, it became evident that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate for the new nation. With these problems hampering the national government under the Articles of Confederation and the threat of default on the nation's massive war debt looming, plans began being made to fix the problems of the Articles of Confederation. Thus, that summer, a Constitutional convention was called, and each state sent delegates to Philadelphia. Among the delegates were prominent patriots and former members of the Continental Congress, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

The Jim Crow South has been notorious for miscarriages of justice for decades, and cases like the Scottsboro Boys continue to be commemorated for the manner in which institutionalized racism ensured the wrongful convictions of minorities. The attention given to these cases raised nearly every potential issue implicating criminal procedure among the states. While the Bill of Rights had ensured a number of rights for criminal defendants, the states had previously been allowed to interpret those rights, leading to instances where defendants weren't provided adequate legal representation.

The term robber baron has largely fallen into disuse in the 21st century but there was a time when it was a popular epithet that described the kind of man who, it was believed, built his fortune by taking things belonging to others. Of all the men labeled as robber barons during the Gilded Age, few were as influential as Henry Clay Frick, who rubbed shoulders with men like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie while overseeing some of the era’s biggest companies.

On October 21, 1600, two massive Japanese armies, totaling an estimated 200,000 soldiers - armed to the teeth with swords, yari (spears), arrows, muskets, and cannons - faced off on a battlefield near the town of Sekigahara. A bitter fight to the death ensued, and the results would determine the course of Japanese history for the next 250 years.

By the mid-15th century, the Byzantine Empire had collapsed and the various Crusades that had taken place in the region had largely disrupted the overland routes of the Silk Road and trade. Compounding the difficulties of trade was the rise of the Ottoman Empire in place of the Byzantines and the outbreak of the Black Death in Europe. This audiobook chronicles the early efforts by the Portuguese that helped initiate the Age of Exploration, and the ramifications the colonization had across the world.

For as long as language and communication have existed, humans have invented ways to mask their messages from prying eyes. One could be forgiven for assuming there are no ciphers left unsolved. On the contrary, a diverse array of both ancient and modern cryptographic challenges, which have stumped even the most seasoned code crackers of today, exist, and may exist for generations to come. Among the most famous of these memorandums is a 600-year-old document that continues to mystify: the Voynich Manuscript.

The Harlot’s Cup is a fast, murderous adventure, a prophetic mystery thrill ride through history with an unfulfilled love that becomes a demonic hate. The Harlot of Revelation 17 is shockingly revealed by modern technology on a 1937 newsreel of the infamous “Panay Incident".

The modern history of Africa was, until very recently, written on behalf of the indigenous races by the white man, who had forcefully entered the continent during a particularly hubristic and dynamic phase of European history. In 1884, Prince Otto von Bismark, the German chancellor, brought the plenipotentiaries of all major powers of Europe together, to deal with Africa's colonization in such a manner as to avoid provocation of war.

From the “Trail of Tears” to Wounded Knee and Little Bighorn, the narrative of American history is incomplete without the inclusion of the Native Americans that lived on the continent before European settlers arrived in the 16th and 17th centuries. Since the first contact between natives and settlers, tribes like the Sioux, Cherokee, and Navajo have both fascinated and perplexed outsiders with their history, language, and culture.

In the 1920s, the burgeoning movie industry was starting to come into its own, and virtually no actor was as famous - or infamous - as John Barrymore. Like many other film stars his age, Barrymore’s career had started in other forms of entertainment, in his case theater. By the time movies were becoming popular, Barrymore was one of the world’s foremost Shakespearean actors.

The annals of world history are filled with intriguing, although often outlandish stories of lost cities and kingdoms, and in addition to Atlantis, there are also Hyperborea, Shambhala, and Aztlan, to name just a few. One of these lost cities is that known as Ubar, Wabar, or Iram. Ubar and its location continued to fascinate people around the world, and it seemed as though its secrets would remain hidden beneath the Arabian sands until the 1980s, when a photojournalist named Nicholas Clapp became interested in the city.

The OSS and CIA: The History of America’s Intelligence Community during World War II and the Establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency looks at the agencies’ organizational characteristics, historical inception, early Cold War growth, and recent influence. You will learn about the OSS and CIA like never before.

The Battle of Red Cliffs changed Chinese history. It marked the end of the Han Dynasty, one of the greatest in China’s history, and pushed China into the era of the Three Kingdoms, an era of perpetual warfare and chaos. Furthermore, the battle also had a dramatic effect on Chinese culture, media, and literature, and the battle and its major participants remain legendary in China.