Discovery History

Over the years, thousands of tales both true and fantastic have been told about the dastardly thievery of pirates. Their rum-drunk exploits and high-seas violence never fail to delight. Now in a brand new series collection, The Best Pirate Stories Ever Told includes many of the very best pirate yarns ever created on history’s most debaucherous scalawags. Anyone who loves a good story full of excitement, adventure, thrills, and laughs will find this collection irresistible.

In 1620, the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and made friends with Wampanoag people who gave them corn. RIGHT? WRONG! It was months before the Pilgrims met any Wampanoag people, and nobody gave anybody corn that day.

For millennia the location of the Nile River’s headwaters was shrouded in mystery. In the 19th century, there was a frenzy of interest in ancient Egypt. At the same time, European powers sent off waves of explorations intended to map the unknown corners of the globe—and extend their colonial empires.

As former vice president of the City of David Foundation, Doron Spielman has guided numerous visitors—including donors, diplomats, professors, celebrities, and American politicians—on a journey into the City of David’s tunnels. While often holding vastly different political views, these visitors agree on one thing: the story of the City of David must be told.

The New York Times best-selling author of Darwin’s Doubt presents groundbreaking scientific evidence of the existence of God, based on breakthroughs in physics, cosmology, and biology.

The frozen wilderness of the Arctic captivated and mystified voyagers and explorers in the 1800s, driven by greed for riches, fame, and the search for the elusive Northwest Passage. Delve into the jaw-dropping courage and awe-inspiring expeditions from the Golden Age of Arctic exploration with "Frozen Frontier" Follow the footsteps of heroic explorers and their courageous penetrations into an unknown world of mammoth ice floes, terrifying polar bears, and bone-chilling cold. Witness their incredible triumphs and heartbreaking tragedies, and discover the untold stories of the earliest ...

Heroes of History: Inspiring Stories to Spark Imagination for Curious Minds. Is your child fascinated by remarkable people who changed the world? Are you looking for educational stories that entertain while they inspire? Give your curious young reader the gift of history's greatest heroes, told through captivating, accessible stories they'll actually want to read! "But my child isn't interested in history!"

Blending high adventure with history, this chronicle of 100 astonishing discoveries from the Dead Sea Scrolls to the fabulous “Lost City of the Monkey God” tells incredible stories of how explorers and archaeologists have uncovered the clues that illuminate our past.

In April 1970, during the glory days of the Apollo space program, NASA sent Navy Captain Jim Lovell and two other astronauts on America's fifth mission to the moon. Only 55 hours into the flight of Apollo 13, disaster struck: a mysterious explosion rocked the ship, and soon its oxygen and power began draining away. Written with all the color and drama of the best fiction, Apollo 13 (previously published as Lost Moon) tells the full story of the moon shot that almost ended in catastrophe.

The legend of King Arthur and his castle Camelot has gripped people’s imagination for centuries. In this classic study, drawing upon myriad sources both literary and historical, the world’s leading Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe digs deep into the important 12th century chronicles of Geoffrey of Monmouth to trace the origins of the myth. Through brilliant historical detective work, he shows that much of Monmouth's history, which sets out to describe fifth-century Britain, was based on fact.

Deep in the Arctic wilderness, Peter Freuchen awoke to find himself buried alive under the snow. During a sudden blizzard the night before, he had taken shelter underneath his dogsled and become trapped there while he slept. Now, as feeling drained from his body, he managed to claw a hole through the ice only to find himself in even greater danger: his beard, wet with condensation from his struggling breath, had frozen to his sled runners and lashed his head in place, exposing it to icy winds that needed only a few minutes to kill him. If Freuchen could escape that, he could escape anything.

From the beginning of Christianity until now, there has always been a mission emphasis in the church's history. It appears that about every two hundred years, a new impetus to the command of Christ to "go out into all the world" would be initiated. It started with the first disciples of Christ and quickly grew into a worldwide movement. During the first thousand years of Christian mission, many churches, such as the Church of the East (Nestorians), the Coptic Church, the Orthodox Church, and the Roman Catholic Church, would each carve their names in the history of the Christian faith. ...

In 2010, using a specialized robotic camera, authors Tabor and Jacobovici, working with archaeologists, geologists, and forensic anthropologists, explored a previously unexcavated tomb in Jerusalem from around the time of Jesus. They made a remarkable discovery. The tomb contained several ossuaries, or bone boxes, two of which were carved with an iconic image and a Greek inscription. Taken together, the image and the inscription constitute the earliest archaeological evidence of faith in Jesus’ resurrection.

Cutting through 160 years of mythmaking, best-selling historian Michael Wallis presents the ultimate cautionary tale of America's westward expansion.

When gold was discovered at Sutter's Mill on the American River, it completely transformed the territory of California. Hundreds of thousands of people sped to California by any means possible, and small cities sprung up to service their needs as they sought the precious metal. By 1850, California had become a state; it had also become a symbol of where the nation was going.

Uncovering the physical remains of our past is a quintessential human itch; the pursuit of every society from the ancients through to today. But the stories behind archaeological exploration and discovery - what we look for when, what we end up finding, and what we then do with it - tell us as much about ourselves today as they do about the past. Through eight sensational stories of discovery, Professor Michael Scott traces the evolution of modern archaeology from colonial expeditions to today's cutting-edge digs, unearthing traps, curses and buried treasure along the way.

On May 24, 1869 a one-armed Civil War veteran, John Wesley Powell, and a ragtag band of nine mountain men embarked on the last great quest in the American West. The Grand Canyon, not explored before, was as mysterious as Atlantis - and as perilous. The 10 men set out from Green River Station, Wyoming Territory, down the Colorado in four wooden rowboats. Ninety-nine days later, six half-starved wretches came ashore near Callville, Arizona.

Atlantic is a biography of a tremendous space that has been central to the ambitions of explorers, scientists, and warriors, and continues profoundly to affect our character, attitudes, and dreams. Spanning the ocean's story, from its geological origins to the age of exploration, from World War II battles to today's struggles with pollution and overfishing, Winchester's narrative is epic, intimate, and awe inspiring.

Growing up in Baltimore, I walked the same streets where Confederate sympathizers had once plotted against the Union my Irish ancestors died defending. But I had no idea of this family legacy—or of the complex, often violent political history that had shaped my hometown long before I was born. The irony runs deeper than I initially realized. My father was a Baltimore native, born and raised in a city that had harbored Confederate sympathies during the Civil War. My mother came from Providence, Rhode Island, descended from Irish immigrants who had sacrificed everything for the Union cause....

Throughout Lewis and Clark for Dummies, you find out about Jefferson's western exploration from his earliest efforts to see the Corps assembled through the aftermath for the explorers, the tribes, and the United States. But the focus of Lewis & Clark for Dummies is on the period between Jefferson's confidential letter to Congress requesting dollars to mount a western exploration (January 18,1803) and the expedition's triumphant (and improbable) return to St. Louis (September 23, 1806): 42 months that changed the world.