Discovery History

Imagine your shock at waking up one morning to a fleet of enormous, otherworldly craft looming over you. And when bizarre aliens begin to emerge - speaking strange gibberish - your heart races even faster. Similar fears may have gripped New World inhabitants when diverse civilizations - separated by a vast ocean - first met. American natives once knew nothing of towering ships, galloping horses, thundering guns, or smallpox. From 1492 onward, however, waves of adventurers would give them a cruel introduction.

When three heroic men traveled aboard the Apollo 11 spacecraft bound for the moon, the entire world sat glued to their television sets in suspense. But few knew just how much it took to get that far. To put a man on the moon, thousands of people diligently worked behind the scenes. Countless preparations had to be made and no detail, however small, could be overlooked - the lives of the crewmen were at stake.

Henry Worsley spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the 19th-century polar explorer who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape and life-threatening physical exhaustion. He soon felt compelled to go back. In 2015, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone.

The Vikings in Iceland: The History of the Norse Expeditions and Settlements Bcross Iceland looks at the history of the Vikings’ activities in Iceland, and how they affected subsequent exploration and colonization. You will learn about the Vikings in Iceland like never before.

Most anyone who has received a basic education in world history knows the story of how "in 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue." Most also know that Christopher Columbus made first contact with the Americas while searching for a water route to Asia. However, far fewer people remember that the search for such a route continued for centuries after Columbus' death.

In 1752, the sky in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, darkened. A thunderstorm was coming. Benjamin Franklin was ready to perform an experiment. He wanted to show the electrical nature of lightning. His experiment was a success, but he didn’t discover electricity that day. Myths about Franklin and his experiment have been told for years. Discover what’s real and what’s fiction through infographics, primary sources, and expertly leveled text.

This audiobook is perfect if you love history or just want to know more cool facts. It’s like a time machine that takes you back to amazing times in history! With 1500 interesting facts bringing history to life, you’ll see the past in a whole new way.

Have you ever wondered how fast a T-Rex could really run, or how much a Triceratops weighed? How about how long a Brachiosaurus’s neck is, or how high a Velociraptor could jump? This audiobook has all of these answers and more! Made for kids ages four and up, Dinosaurs for Kids is packed with interesting facts for the entire family.

An improbable world beckons. We think we know Madagascar, but it's too big, too eccentric and too impenetrable to be truly understood. If it was stretched out across Europe, the islands would reach from London to Algiers, and yet its road network is barely bigger than tiny Jamaica's. There is no evidence of any human life until about 10,000 years ago, and, when eventually people settled, it was migrants from Borneo - 3,700 miles away - who came out on top.

Thousands of American settlers endured the long trip of more than 2,000 miles between Missouri and Oregon in the mid-1800s. They were determined to make a better life for themselves. They faced many hardships and made tough choices. Now the choices are yours. Would you rather run out of food supplies or spare wagon parts? Would you ford the river and get across faster but risk your wagon overturning? Or would you take apart your wagon and float it across but risk delaying your time-sensitive journey? It's your turn to pick this or that!

This entertaining book encourages young listeners to become creative thinkers. People with great ideas, some famous and some not so much, invented the things we use every day. Inventors like Ben Franklin, the Wright Brothers, Heddy Lamar, and Josephine Cochran dreamed the big dreams that led to lightning rods, airplanes, torpedoes, and dishwashers.

In the tradition of Daniel Boorstin, the co-founder of Omni delivers an original work of history that demonstrates why modern science rests on a foundation built by ancient and medieval non-European societies. "If you think that modern science is rooted in the golden age of Greece, you owe it to yourself to [hear this] book," says Library Journal.

On 22 August 1485, Richard III was killed at Bosworth Field, the last king of England to die in battle. His victorious opponent, Henry Tudor (the future Henry VII), went on to found one of our most famous ruling dynasties. Richard's body was displayed in undignified fashion for two days in nearby Leicester and then hurriedly buried in the church of the Greyfriars. Fifty years later, at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, the king's grave was lost - its contents believed to be emptied into the river Soar - and Richard III's reputation buried under a mound of Tudor propaganda.

The North Pole, originally published in 1910, makes available Robert E. Peary's own account of his expedition in the Arctic. It provides hotly contested evidence that remains an indispensable key in deciding who deserved the coveted title "Discoverer of the North Pole". It is also a gripping adventure story that is impossible to put down.

A Short History of Seafaring tells the 5,000 year history of the remarkable individuals who sailed seas, for trade, to conquer new lands, to explore the unknown. From the early Polynesians to the first circumnavigations by the Portuguese and the British, these are awe-inspiring tales of epic sea voyages involving great feats of seamanship, navigation, endurance, and ingenuity. Explore the lives and maritime adventures, many with first person narratives, of land seekers and globe charters such as Christopher Columbus, Captain James Cook and Vitus Bering.

Peter Frankopan, number one best-selling author and historian, explores the connections made by people, trade, disease, war, religion, adventure, science and technology in this extraordinary book about how the East married the West with a remarkable voyage at its heart - the journey along the Silk Roads.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong took one giant leap for mankind when he became the first person to set foot on the moon. Now, listeners can step back in time to learn about what led up to the Apollo 11 moon landing, how the historic event unfolded, and the ways in which one remarkable day changed America forever.

In 1845, Sir John Franklin and his men set out to "penetrate the icy fastness of the north, and to circumnavigate America." And then they disappeared. The truth about what happened to Franklin's ill-fated Arctic expedition was shrouded in mystery for more than a century. Then, in 1984, Owen Beattie and his team exhumed two crew members from a burial site in the North for forensic evidence, to shocking results. But the most startling discovery didn't come until 2014, when a team commissioned by the Canadian government uncovered one of the lost ships: Erebus.

"You seriously mean to tell me that the ship is doomed?" asked Frank Worsley, commander of the Endurance, stuck impassably in Antarctic ice packs. "What the ice gets," replied Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition's unflappable leader, "the ice keeps." It did not, however, get the ship's twenty-five crew members, all of whom survived an eight-hundred-mile voyage across sea, land, and ice to South Georgia, the nearest inhabited island.

A chronicle of Vienna's Golden Age and the influence of Sigmund Freud on the modern world by a clinical psychologist whose mystery novels form the basis of PBS's Vienna Blood series.