"Some of humanity's mightiest engineering achievements are small in scale--and, without them, the complex machinery on which our modern world runs would not exist. In Nuts and Bolts, structural engineer Roma Agrawal examines seven of these extraordinary elements: the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, the string, and the pump. Tracing the evolution from Egyptian nails to modern skyscrapers, and Neanderthal string to musical instruments,...

"The first major history of Mormonism in a decade, drawing on newly available sources to reveal a profoundly divided faith that has nevertheless shaped the nation"--

J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is best known for creating the atomic bomb during WWII as the wartime head of the Los Alamos Laboratory. He famously witnessed the first atomic bomb detonation in New Mexico in 1945 and later quoted the Bhagavad Gita saying "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." This documentary examines Oppenheimer's life, from his early years to his involvement with...

A four-part documentary television program that brings a modern British family from 1999 back to life in 1900 Victorian London.

"A gripping first-hand account from inside the halls of Congress as Donald Trump and his enablers betrayed the American people and the Constitution--leading to the violent attack on our Capitol on January 6th, 2021--by the House Republican leader who dared to stand up to it. In the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump and many around him, including certain other elected Republican officials, intentionally breached their oath to...

The dramatic story of America's national mammal, which sustained the lives of Native people for untold generations, being driven to the brink of extinction, before an unlikely collection of people rescues it from disappearing forever.

A wide ranging, philosophical, and sensual account of early deep sea exploration and its afterlives, The Bathysphere Book begins with the first ever voyage to the deep ocean in 1930 and expands to explore the adventures and entanglements of its all-too-human participants at a time when the world still felt entirely new. In the summer of 1930, aboard a ship floating near the Atlantic island of Nonsuch, marine biologist Gloria Hollister sat on a crate,...

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, from its slightly shabby Iron Age origins to its reign as the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean. Now, drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and writing about Roman history, Beard turns to the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire, beginning with Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) and taking us through the nearly three centuries―and some thirty...

"Helsinki, 1947. Finland teeters between the Soviet Union and the West. Everyone is being watched. A wrong look or a wrong word could end in catastrophe. Natalya Bobrova, from Russia, and Louise Koski, from the United States, are young wives of their country's military attachés. When they meet at an embassy party, their husbands, Arnie and Mikhail, both world-class skiers, drunkenly challenge each other to a friendly-but secret-cross-country wilderness...

Lucy Worsley re-stages the wedding of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, including the most important elements of the ceremony and the celebrations, scouring archival materials and Queen Victoria's diaries for the details. Lucy also tells the story of Victoria and Albert's courtship and engagement as she reveals how this one extraordinary event helped to invent modern marriage.