Knowledge = Power

Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning author Richard Rhodes  reveals the fascinating history behind energy transitions over time—wood  to coal to oil to electricity and beyond. People have lived and  died, businesses have prospered and failed, and nations have risen to  world power and declined, all over energy challenges. Ultimately, the  history of these challenges tells the story of humanity itself. Through an unforgettable cast of characters, Pulitzer Prize-winning  author Richard Rhodes explains how wood gave way to coal and coal made  room for oil, as we now turn to natural gas, nuclear power, and  renewable energy. Rhodes looks back on five centuries of progress,  through such influential figures as Queen Elizabeth I, King James I,  Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford. In Energy,  Rhodes highlights the successes and failures that led to each  breakthrough in energy production; from animal and waterpower to the  steam engine, from internal-combustion to the electric motor. He  addresses how we learned from such challenges, mastered their  transitions, and capitalized on their opportunities. Rhodes also looks  at the current energy landscape, with a focus on how wind energy is  competing for dominance with cast supplies of coal and natural gas. He  also addresses the specter of global warming, and a population hurtling  towards ten billion by 2100. Human beings have confronted the  problem of how to draw life from raw material since the beginning of  time. Each invention, each discovery, each adaptation brought further  challenges, and through such transformations, we arrived at where we are  today. In Rhodes’s singular style, Energy details how this knowledge of our history can inform our way tomorrow.

Hidden deep within the daily workings of governments and civilizations is a secret world of mystery, danger, and intrigue. A world where deception is a form of art. Where people are never who they say they are. Where the tiniest observation has the power to save an empire or spark a global war. Welcome to the world of the spy—a world that most of us associate with popular fiction and film but the true story of which is more fascinating, surprising, and important than you could possibly imagine. For thousands of years, espionage and covert operations have been powerful but shadowy forces. Much of world history has been shaped by the dramatic exploits of men, women, and organizations devoted to the perilous tasks and undercover missions that are part of a spy's life. Consider that covert operations have played critical roles in epic conflicts such as the Trojan War, the Crusades, World War II, and the War on Terror; political upheavals such as the American, French, and Russian revolutions; and even cultural moments such as the quest to colonize the New World, the 19th-century expansion of empires, and race to build the world's first atomic bomb. Indeed, to truly comprehend the forces at work in international politics, whether at the dawn of civilization or among today's sophisticated world powers, one must understand the secret role of espionage and the shadowy world of covert operations. Espionage and Covert Operations: A Global History is your chance to take a detailed and unforgettable tour of the millennia-long history and enduring legacy of this top-secret subject. Delivered by master historian and popular Great Courses Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, these 24 thrilling lectures survey how world powers have attempted to work in the shadows to gain secret information or subvert enemies behind the scenes. Filled with stories that are both marvelous and mysterious, and insights that will change the way you think about some of world history's most defining events, this course lets you peer inside a subject whose truths most people are unaware of.

The definitive history of nuclear weapons and the Manhattan Project. From the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan, Richard Rhodes’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb. This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans’ race to beat Hitler’s Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychology—from FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence. From nuclear power’s earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story. Richard Rhodes’s ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.

“Nothing short of a masterpiece.”―NPR Books A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book of the Year In the most ambitious one-volume American history in decades,  award-winning historian Jill Lepore offers a magisterial account of the  origins and rise of a divided nation. Widely hailed for its “sweeping, sobering account of the American past” (New York Times Book Review),  Jill Lepore’s one-volume history of America places truth itself―a  devotion to facts, proof, and evidence―at the center of the nation’s  history. The American experiment rests on three ideas―“these truths,”  Jefferson called them―political equality, natural rights, and the  sovereignty of the people. But has the nation, and democracy itself,  delivered on that promise? These Truths tells this  uniquely American story, beginning in 1492, asking whether the course of  events over more than five centuries has proven the nation’s truths, or  belied them. To answer that question, Lepore wrestles with the state of  American politics, the legacy of slavery, the persistence of  inequality, and the nature of technological change. “A nation born in  contradiction… will fight, forever, over the meaning of its history,”  Lepore writes, but engaging in that struggle by studying the past is  part of the work of citizenship. With These Truths, Lepore has produced a book that will shape our view of American history for decades to come.

Know thy enemy. That's what the wisdom of history teaches us. And Adolf Hitler was surely the greatest enemy ever faced by modern civilization. Over half a century later, the horror and fascination still linger. No one is better able to explain the unexplainable about this man and his movement than Professor Thomas Childers. In these lectures, you will see what great teaching is all about.

The first riveting examination of the shocking infiltration of the US government by Stalin’s Soviet intelligence networks during WWII. Until now, many sinister events that transpired in the clash of the world's superpowers at the close of World War II and the ensuing Cold War era have been ignored, distorted, and kept hidden from the public. Through a careful survey of primary sources and disclosure of formerly secret records, Evans and Romerstein have written a riveting historical account that traces the vast deceptions that kept Stalin's henchmen on the federal payroll and sabotaged U.S. policy overseas. The facts presented here expose shocking cover-ups, from the top FDR aides who threatened internal security and free-world interests by exerting pro-Red influence on U.S.policy, to the grand juries that were rigged, to the countless officials of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations who turned a blind eye to the penetration problem. Stalin's Secret Agents convincingly indicts in historical retrospect the people responsible for these corruptions of justice.

The New York Times best-selling author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The War of the Roses,  historian Alison Weir crafts fascinating portraits of England’s  infamous House of Tudor line. Here Weir focuses on Elizabeth I, also  known as the Virgin Queen, who ascended to the throne at age 25 and  never married, yet ruled for 44 years and steered England into its  Golden Age.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE STANDS as the greatest political achievement in the  history of Western civilization. From its humble beginnings as a tiny  kingdom in central Italy, Rome grew to envelope the entire Mediterranean  until it ruled an empire that stretched from the Atlantic to Syria and  from the Sahara to Scotland. Its enduring legacy continues to define the  modern world. Mike Duncan chronicled the rise, triumph, and fall of the  Roman Empire in his popular podcast series "The History of Rome".  Transcripts of the show have been edited and collected here for the  first time. Covering episodes 1-46, The History of Rome Volume I opens  with the founding of the Roman Kingdom and ends with the breakdown of  the Roman Republic. Along the way Rome will steadily grow from local  power to regional power to global power. The Romans will triumph over  their greatest foreign rivals and then nearly destroy themselves in a  series of destructive civil wars. This is the story of the rise of Rome. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The  creator of the award-winning podcast series The History of Rome and  Revolutions brings to life the bloody battles, political machinations,  and human drama that set the stage for the fall of the Roman Republic.

Best-selling author Adrian  Goldsworthy turns his attention to the Pax Romana, the famous peace and  prosperity brought by the Roman Empire at its height in the first and  second centuries AD. Yet the Romans were conquerors, imperialists who  took by force a vast empire stretching from the Euphrates to the  Atlantic coast. Ruthless, Romans won peace not through coexistence but  through dominance; millions died and were enslaved during the creation  of their empire. Pax Romana examines how the Romans came to control so much of  the world and asks whether traditionally favorable images of the Roman  peace are true. Goldsworthy vividly recounts the rebellions of the  conquered and examines why they broke out, why most failed, and how they  became exceedingly rare. He reveals that hostility was just one  reaction to the arrival of Rome and that from the outset, conquered  peoples collaborated, formed alliances, and joined invaders, causing  resistance movements to fade away.

Prophet Muhammad