検索キーワード： 著者 "Charles Rivers" すべてのカテゴリー

The Wright Brothers initially underestimated the difficulties involved in flying, and they were apparently surprised by the fact that so many others were working on solving the “problem of human flight” already. Decades before their own historic plane would end up in the National Air & Space Museum, Wilbur and Orville asked the Smithsonian for reading materials and brushed up on everything from the works of their contemporaries to Leonardo Da Vinci.

While actors like Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant remain household names, and actresses like Greta Garbo are still widely remembered, few had careers that enjoyed the success of William Powell. In a career spanning several decades, Powell would receive three Oscar nominations for Best Actor for critically acclaimed movies, so it is somewhat ironic that he is mostly remembered today for his association with the more famous Myrna Loy. Together, they starred in 14 films, including the 1934 box office hit, The Thin Man.

The annals of world history are filled with intriguing, although often outlandish stories of lost cities and kingdoms, and in addition to Atlantis, there are also Hyperborea, Shambhala, and Aztlan, to name just a few. One of these lost cities is that known as Ubar, Wabar, or Iram. Ubar and its location continued to fascinate people around the world, and it seemed as though its secrets would remain hidden beneath the Arabian sands until the 1980s, when a photojournalist named Nicholas Clapp became interested in the city.

The Silk Road and the Incense Trade Route have been heavily investigated in recent decades, but the Amber Road trade network dominating northern Europe has been given far less attention. Perhaps even more interesting than the movement of the amber is regarding shifting trade operations from government controlled systems to private merchant enterprises to monopolies of guilds and orders, a return to government control, and finally, the selling of the trade to individual countries.

The Vietnam War could have been called a comedy of errors if the consequences weren’t so deadly and tragic. In 1951, while war was raging in Korea, the United States began signing defense pacts with nations in the Pacific, intending to create alliances that would contain the spread of Communism. As the Korean War was winding down, America joined the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, pledging to defend several nations in the region from Communist aggression. One of those nations was South Vietnam.

Few people need to be reminded in the 21st century of the cost of European imperialism and colonization on indigenous and native cultures around the world. The increasingly controversial view of Columbus Day, still represented on the United States commemorative calendar, attests quite clearly to an ambiguous modern view of early European encounters with Native Americans. Slavery, disease, land and resource appropriation, and the rapid disintegration of indigenous societies are all characteristics of European global expansion.

The Soviet Nuclear Weapons Program: The History and Legacy of the USSR’s Efforts to Build the Atomic Bomb examines the Soviets’ race to reach the ultimate goal during and after World War II, and how they went about their objectives. You will learn about Nazi Germany’s nuclear weapons program like never before.

Dirigibles proved popular in a variety of different ways throughout the 20th century, and they continued to be complements, even as airplane technologies rapidly advanced. Modern Balloons and Airships: The History and Legacy of Dirigibles During the 20th Century looks at the development of balloons and airships during the 20th century and the innovative ways they were used.

In the manner that Samuel Colt broke open the single-shot tradition in hand weapons, Oliver Fisher Winchester and his celebrated rifle shared the title of “the gun that won the West”. In the arena of portable arms, these two men dominated much of the technological and promotive aspects of 19th century weaponry, alternating between resisting and collaborating with rivals.

The belief in lycanthropy is far older and more complex than most people suspect, dating all the way back to antiquity, and werewolves were once assumed to be very real. Indeed, people were even put on trial and executed because the courts of law were convinced they could change their form and kill innocent people. For thousands of years, werewolves have represented a strange and ancient tradition that still echoes through culture to this day.

He appears once in the New Testament, mentioned only in passing in the Acts of the Apostles; only a few verses in the canon, but for the primitive Church, there is a whole corpus about Simon Magus, its most formidable antagonist, an enemy of such colossal proportions that he deserved to be called "the father of all heresies." His only mention in the Bible occurs at the beginning of the second volume of Luke the Evangelist where he had a minor confrontation with Saint Peter which nonetheless had a happy ending.

For the most part, the Uighurs are based in East Turkestan, more commonly referred to as the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region of the People's Republic of China...The Uighurs: The History and Legacy of the Turkic Muslim Minority Group in Asia examines the origins of the Uighurs, their long history, and the notorious current events involving the Uighurs in China.

After the last shots of World War II were fired and the process of rebuilding Germany and Europe began, the Western Allies and the Soviet Union each tried to obtain the services of the Third Reich's leading scientists, especially those involved in rocketry, missile technology, and aerospace research. Naturally, this was a delicate affair due to the fact many of the German scientists were not only active Nazis but had helped the Nazi war machine terrorize the world.

Walt Whitman was a great American poet, but many people did not get him when he was alive. His family was like most other families, but his friends were different from most other people living then. He was a teacher and reporter, and then he worked for the government. When he was a young man, he was very serious, but when he was older he liked to play around and have fun. Walt Whitman wrote many poems about America, and his most famous work was Leaves of Grass. It was a lot of poems that took him many years to finish.

Some of the most iconic symbols of the Roman Empire that have survived into the modern world today are the arches that Romans erected to commemorate military victories and glorify individual emperors. The story of how arches came to be used throughout the Roman world in such a way is one that involves the evolution of the military and its leaders into the political forces that came to dominate the state, and those arches, along with the triumphs that came to be associated with many of them, were key parts in the process of exhibiting the might of both Rome.

The 19th century saw the rise of one of the largest, most powerful empires of the modern era. The sun never set on the British Empire, whose holdings spanned the globe, in one form or another. Its naval supremacy linked the Commonwealth of Canada with the colonies in South Africa and India, and through them trade flowed east and west. An integral but underutilized part of this vast trade network included China, a reclusive Asian kingdom closed off from the Western world that desired none of its goods.

Though it might be hard to believe, the Americans did not have a covert operations organization when they joined World War II, and like the British, it took them some time to realize it could be a powerful tool. As a result, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was not established until June 13, 1942, six months after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Early Balloons and Airships: The History of the City’s Underground Ossuaries and Burial Network looks at the development of the first balloons and airships, and how they were primarily used. You will learn about the first airships like never before.

Over the course of the 19th century, the people of Sicily found themselves at the center of a struggle for freedom, one that ended up being long and often very bloody. It was during these crucial years of struggle that the Sicilian mafia, La Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing"), started to take shape. Cosa Nostra: The Notorious History and Legacy of the Sicilian Mafia examines how the world’s most famous mob formed, its inner workings, and the events that made it feared around the world.

Plenty of unusual characters came to the colonies to participate in the war, with many sporting dubious titles such as the Baron de Kalb, but perhaps none arrived in a more unique way than John Paul Jones...and his aggression became the stuff of legend. While the British accused him of being a pirate, he was feted by the Americans and French during the war before joining the Russian navy after the war.