"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,...

"1925. London. When Alice Diamond, AKA "Diamond Annie," is elected the Queen of the Forty Elephants, she's determined to take the all-girl gang to new heights. She's ambitious, tough as nails, and a brilliant mastermind, with a plan to create a dynasty the likes of which no one has ever seen. Alice demands absolute loyalty from her "family"--it's how she's always kept the cops in line. Too bad she's now the target for one of Britain's first female...

Lucy Worsley gets into bed with the past monarchs to uncover the "Tales from the royal bedchamber". She reveals that the obsession with royal bedrooms, births and succession is nothing new. In fact, the rise and fall of their magnificent beds reflects the changing fortunes of the monarchy itself.

Blends strange but true facts about the natural world with a handful of fictional accounts, challenging readers to discover which two out of every three stories are true.

"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"--

Did you know that there are more penises than women in the Bayeux Tapestry? That the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was started and propelled by women who were protesting a tax on women? Or that celebrated naturalist Charles Darwin believed not just that women were naturally inferior to men, but that they’d evolve to become ever more inferior? These are just a few of the startling findings you will learn from reading Philippa Gregory’s Normal Women....

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...

It is said that the Canal will be the greatest feat of engineering in history. But first, it must be built. Ada Bunting, a bold sixteen-year-old from Barbados, arrives alone in Panama as a stowaway alongside thousands of other West Indians seeking work in the grand building project of the Canal. Francisco, a local fisherman, resents the foreign nations clamouring for a slice of his country, but nothing is more upsetting for him than his son Omar’s...

The Declaration of Independence identified "the pursuit of happiness" as one of our unalienable rights, along with life and liberty. Jeffrey Rosen, the president of the National Constitution Center, profiles six of the most influential founders--Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton--to show what pursuing happiness meant in their lives.

"Lord Rosemorran has purchased a wax figure of a beautiful reclining woman and asks Stoker to incorporate a clockwork mechanism to give the Rosemorran Collection its own Sleeping Beauty in the style of Madame Tussaud's. But when Stoker goes to cut the mannequin open to insert the mechanism, he makes a gruesome discovery: this is no wax figure. The mannequin is the beautifully preserved body of a young woman who was once very much alive. But who would...