Charles River Editors

Theologian and reformer John Wycliffe never had the opportunity to take his doctrines outside of his native England, but he could never have imagined that his teachings would one day travel as far as 920 miles east to Bohemia. In fact, while his contentious convictions aroused much ado....

The current view of science is that Earth is around 4.6 billion years old. The first four billion years of its development are known as the Precambrian period.

Jomini was regarded as the preeminent strategist and writer of his generation, while Clausewitz was virtually unknown outside the General Staff of the Prussian Army....

At the conclusion of World War I, a once promised unified Arab state did not materialize....

Jean Antoinette Poussin, the woman who would become known as Madame de Pompadour, was a middle-class girl of uncertain parenthood who became one of many in a long line of King Louis XV’s mistresses before she died at the age of 42....

A diverse array of ancient and modern cryptographic challenges exists today. Among the most famous is a 600-year-old document that continues to mystify: the Voynich Manuscript....

The Hubble Space Telescope: The History and Legacy of the World’s Most Famous Telescope chronicles the fascinating story of the telescope’s origins, deployment, and production. You will learn about the Hubble telescope like never before....

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....

In the opening pages of his seminal book-length study of Alfred Hitchcock, Hitchcock's Films (1965), Robin Wood famously asked, "Why Should We Take Hitchcock Seriously?"....

During the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500-1200 BCE, the Near East was a time and place where great kingdoms and empires vied for land and influence, playing high stakes diplomatic games, trading, and occasionally going to war with each other in the process.

Situated about 25 miles off the Tanzanian coast, Zanzibar has captured the imagination of travelers and writers for hundreds of years....

Japan's blissful isolation changed with the arrival of American Commodore Matthew Perry in 1853. In awe of the American weapons and ships, the Tokugawa shogunate quickly realized that they needed to evolve and modernize their military to survive, and a time of rapid change descended on Japan.

In southern Iraq, a crushing silence hangs over the dunes. For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians.

Before the Mongols rode across the steppes of Asia and Eastern Europe, the Cumans were a major military and cultural force that monarchs from China to Hungary and from Russia to the Byzantine Empire faced, often losing armies and cities in the process....

Over the centuries the West has become fascinated by the Vikings, one of the most mysterious and interesting European civilizations....

In 1956 Duke Ellington was featured on the cover of Time magazine after a bravura performance at the Newport Jazz Festival that summer. This remains one of his iconic achievements....

In 2014, the International Space Station unleashed a series of photographs that had netizens around the globe simultaneously slapping their cheeks in disbelief for more reasons than one....

In Charles River Editors' British Legends series, listeners can get caught up to speed on the lives of Great Britain’s most important men and women....

Blaise Pascal: The Life and Legacy of the Legendary French Mathematician and Theologian examines the life and work that made this unconventionally educated yet brilliant scientist, mathematician, and man of letters one of modern history’s most important figures....

The 1920s in the United States were known as the "Roaring '20s" and the Jazz Age, a time in the nation that glorified hard and fast living....