Philip II ruled France with an iron fist for over 40 years, expanding its borders and increasing its power. For his entire reign his counterpart on the English throne was a member of the Plantagenet dynasty, and Philip took on them all: Henry II, Richard the Lionheart, John and Henry III. And yet we know so little about medieval England’s greatest enemy.

Tim Queeney is a sailor who knows more about rope and its importance to humankind than most. In Rope, Queeney takes listeners on a ride through the history of rope and the way it weaves itself through the story of civilization. From Magellan's world-circling ships, to the fifteenth-century fleet of Admiral Zheng He, to Polynesian multihulls with crab claw sails, he shows how without rope, none of their adventurous voyages and discoveries would have been possible.

During the 1920s, dozens of expeditions scoured the Chinese and Tibetan wilderness in search of the panda bear, a beast that many believed did not exist. When the two eldest sons of President Theodore Roosevelt sought the bear in 1928, they had little hope of success. Together with a team of scientists and naturalists, they accomplished what a decade of explorers could not, ultimately introducing the panda to the West. In the process, they documented a vanishing world and set off a new era of conservation biology.

An in-depth, authoritative account of the fall of 1914 on the Western Front and the First Battle of Ypres, a true turning point in World War I and in modern warfare—by the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History

The Breath of the Gods is an urgently-needed portrait across time of that unseen force—unseen but not unfelt—that respects no national borders and no vessel or structure in its path. Wind, the movement of the air, is seen by so many as a heavenly creation and generally a thing of essential goodness. But when it flexes its invisible muscles, all should take care and be very afraid.

In 1878, Wyatt Earp, town marshall of Dodge City, was attempting to arrest some drunken, armed men who’d cornered him in a saloon. John Henry “Doc” Holliday, who'd been gambling nearby, stepped in with a revolver and quieted the drunks, allowing Earp to make his arrests. This was the start to the most legendary friendship and partnership of the American West. Through action-packed adventures, Gardner shows us how, over the years, Holliday became like a brother to Wyatt, riding from town to town, throughout the west.

A groundbreaking history of pirates, Enemies of All combines narrative adventure with deeply researched analysis, engrossing listeners in the rise of piracy in the later seventeenth century, the debates about piracy in contemporary law and popular media, as well as the imperial efforts to suppress piracy in the early eighteenth century.

On February 3, 1889, just two days shy of her forty-first birthday, Myra Maybelle Shirley—better known at that point by her outlaw sobriquet “Belle Starr”—was blown from her horse saddle and killed by a pair of shotgun blasts, delivered by an unseen assailant, only a few miles away from her home in the Indian Territory of present-day Oklahoma. Thus ended the life of one of the most colorful, authentic, and dangerous women in the history of the American West.

On May 19, 1884, the yacht Mignonette set sail from England on what should have been an uneventful voyage. When their vessel sank in the Atlantic, Captain Thomas Dudley and his crew found themselves adrift in a tiny lifeboat. As days turned to weeks, they faced an unthinkable choice: starve to death or resort to cannibalism. Their decision to sacrifice the youngest – 17-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker – ignited a firestorm of controversy upon their rescue.

The Mission has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

New York City entered 1986 as a city reborn, with record profits on Wall Street sending waves of money splashing across Manhattan and bringing a once-bankrupt, reeling city back to life. But it also entered 1986 as a city divided. Nearly one-third of the city’s Black and Hispanic residents were living below the federal poverty line. Thousands of New Yorkers were sleeping in the streets—and in many cases addicted to drugs, dying of AIDS, or suffering from mental illness.

There was one submarine that outfought all other boats in the Silent Service in World War II: the USS Tang. Captain Richard Hetherington O’Kane commanded the attack submarine that sunk more tonnage, rescued more downed aviators, and successfully completed more surface attacks than any other American submarine. These undersea predators were the first to lead the offensive rebound against the Japanese, but at great cost: Submariners would have six times the mortality rate as the sailors who manned surface ships.

A shocking story of ambition and greed, crime and punishment, Meet the Kellys offers a fascinating portrait of a reluctant gangster named after a machine gun and a scheming moll as driven as Bonnie Parker and Ma Barker.

Stepping back to look at our precariously interdependent global society of today—with the threat of nuclear war ever present, the world getting hotter and hotter, and the rapid creation of dangerous algorithms—one couldn’t be blamed for asking: Will we make it? Addressing this question with the seriousness it demands, Cambridge scholar Luke Kemp conducts a historical autopsy that stretches over 300,000 years, from our beginnings as a species to early attempts at cities to Egypt, Rome, and on into our cloudy future.

The British monarchy of today descends directly from one leader: King James I, whose huge—and much overlooked—influence launched England as a major international trade power, established the King James Bible, and united the royal families of Scotland and England under one house and one monarch.