Modern English History

The US government has spent half the time covering up conspiracies as it has spent helping the American people. In Hidden History, you will see the amount of effort over the past fifty years that our government has dedicated to lying and covering up the truth to the world. Starting with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Don Jeffries chronicles a wide variety of issues that have plagued our country's history.

There’s more to salvation than punching your ticket for heaven. John Wesley taught that full salvation means becoming completely holy in heart and life. This focus on personal holiness was one of the defining characteristics of the Wesleyan revival. The many Methodist and Wesleyan denominations, the Pentecostal and holiness movements, and the Salvation Army all trace their lineage back to these teachings. Wesley’s followers believed what he taught fiercely, lived it out faithfully, and witnessed to it boldly, to the point that they were often violently persecuted. Today, millions of ...

On the death of France's most glorious king, Louis XIV, in 1715, few people benefited from the shift in power more than the intriguing financial genius from Edinburgh, John Law. Law had proposed to the English monarch that a bank be established to issue paper money with the credit based on the value of land. But Queen Anne was not about to take advice from a gambler and felon. So, in exile in Paris, he convinced the bankrupt court of Louis XV of the value of his idea.

Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? The Horse, the Wheel, and Language solves a puzzle that has vexed scholars for two centuries and recovers a magnificent and influential civilization from the past.

Many people know about the glories of ancient Greece: the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the sculptures, the writings of Homer, and the adventures of Achilles and Jason and the Argonauts. They know about the Greek gods and goddesses, of Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Hermes, Aphrodite, Poseidon, and many others. Even the term “Trojan Horse", named after the trick that the Greeks played on the inhabitants of Troy, has made it into our language. Ancient Greece gave us philosophy, math, medicine, the roots of many languages, and so much more.

Aubrey Clayton traces the history of how statistics went astray, beginning with the groundbreaking work of the 17th-century mathematician Jacob Bernoulli and winding through gambling, astronomy, and genetics. Clayton recounts the feuds among rival schools of statistics, exploring the surprisingly human problems that gave rise to the discipline and the all-too-human shortcomings that derailed it.

The Age of Choice tells the long history of the invention of choice as the defining feature of modern freedom. Taking listeners from the seventeenth century to today, Sophia Rosenfeld describes how the early modern world witnessed the simultaneous rise of shopping as an activity and religious freedom as a matter of being able to pick one's convictions. Similarly, she traces the history of choice in romantic life, politics, and the ideals of human rights. Throughout, she pays particular attention to the lives of women, who have frequently been the drivers of this change.

This comprehensive history sets yoga in its global cultural context for the first time. It leads us on a fascinating journey across the world, from arcane religious rituals and medieval body-magic, through muscular Christianity and the British Raj, to the Indian nationalist movement and the arrival of yoga in the 20th-century West. We discover how the practice reached its present-day ubiquity and how it became embedded in powerful social currents shaping the world's future.

This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly 19-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the US Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.

In the period between the Civil War and the New Deal, American governance was transformed, with momentous implications for social and economic life. Legal reforms gradually brought an end to traditions of local self-government and associative citizenship, replacing them with positive statecraft: governmental activism intended to change how Americans lived and worked. William J. Novak shows how Americans translated new conceptions of citizenship, social welfare, and economic democracy into demands for law and policy that delivered public services and vindicated people's rights.

Populism, on both the right and the left, has spread like wildfire throughout Europe and the United States and is making inroads in other parts of the world. In simplest terms, populism is a political ideology that vilifies elites, minorities, and foreigners while lionizing "the people."

The Mao Zedong Reader: How to Understand Chinese Ideology to Improve Foreign Policy and Relations with China Edited by Eric Engle For the first time, a comprehensive collection of Mao Zedong's most important writings is available in a single volume. The Mao Zedong Reader is the definitive guide to understanding the ideology that shaped modern China and continues to influence its foreign policy today. With a wide-ranging selection of Mao's writings, from his early revolutionary days to his later years as China's leader, this book provides a nuanced and balanced view of his thought. Dr. Eric ...

Modern Physics and Ancient Faith argues that the great discoveries of modern physics are more compatible with the central teachings of Christianity and Judaism about God, the cosmos, and the human soul than with the atheistic viewpoint of scientific materialism.

In 63 BC, frustrated by his failure to be elected leader of the Roman Republic, the aristocrat Catiline tried to topple its elected government. Backed by corrupt elites and poor, alienated Romans, he fled Rome while his associates plotted to burn the city and murder its leading politicians. The attempted coup culminated with the unmasking of the conspirators in the Senate. In How to Stop a Conspiracy, Josiah Osgood presents a brisk, modern new translation of the definitive account of these events, Sallust's The War with Catiline.

Today, the US Constitution is the oldest, continually-operating instrument of government in the world. But to think of the Constitution as a fully-formed, canonical document is to miss out on an honest, well-rounded grasp of American history. Now, more than ever, any well-informed citizen should understand how the Constitution lives, breathes, and endures.

During the peak of the Somali piracy crisis, three ships - from Malaysia, Thailand and Taiwan - were hijacked and then abandoned to their fate by their employers, who lacked the money to pay ransoms. All would still be there, were it not for Colonel John Steed, a retired British military attaché, who launched his own private mission to free them. Author Colin Freeman, who has himself spent time held hostage by Somali pirates, takes listeners on an inside track into the world of hostage negotiation and one man’s heroic rescue mission.

Joseph Seligman arrived in the United States in 1837, with the equivalent of $100 sewn into the lining of his pants. Then came the Lehman brothers, who would open a general store in Montgomery, Alabama. Not far behind were Solomon Loeb and Marcus Goldman, among the “Forty-Eighters” fleeing a Germany that had relegated Jews to an underclass.

The adoption of the landmark Voting Rights Act in 1965 enfranchised millions of Americans and is widely regarded as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement. Yet fifty years later, we are still fighting heated battles over race, representation, and political power - over the right to vote, the central pillar of our democracy. A groundbreaking narrative history of voting rights since 1965, Give Us the Ballot tells the story of what happened after the act was passed.

From the creation of the first encyclopedia to Wikipedia, from ancient museums to modern kindergarten classes—this is Simon Winchester’s brilliant and all-encompassing look at how humans acquire, retain, and pass on information and data, and how technology continues to change our lives and our minds. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information without wisdom?

In August 1945, a handful of people raised a homemade cotton flag and announced the birth of a new nation. With the fourth largest population in the world, inhabiting islands that span an eighth of the globe, Indonesia became the first country to rid itself of colonial rule after WWII.