検索キーワード： ナレーター "Charlton Griffin" すべてのカテゴリー

Volume three begins in January 1759 with the marriage of George Washington to the wealthy widow, Martha Dandridge Custis. Although his own estate was a large one, the marriage vaulted him to the class of the largest landholders. Having been earlier elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses, Washington now assumed a place in Virginia society reserved for a talented elite. He tirelessly took on an increasingly difficult number of responsibilities concerning his social, political, and economic circumstances.

Book two of Theodore Mommsen's history begins in 509 BC, when the last Roman king was expelled and a republican form of government was formed. Starting here, we trace Rome's political and cultural development under an aristocracy whose puritan fanaticism is legendary. But security from surrounding hostile tribes was of uppermost concern, and the city was constantly at war with one tribe or another. During the fifth century BC, the Republic's energies were directed toward uniting or subduing her neighbors.

At the beginning of the 16th century, a religious revolution shattered the outward appearance of conformity among Europe's Roman Catholics...a conformity that had been the basis of Western European unity for over a thousand years. Why did it happen? In this brilliant history, Professor Mosse exposes the crisis of the Papacy in preceeding centuries and shows how the need for reform was continually being delayed until it was simply too late.

The history of England can be said to have begun with the arrival of Julius Caesar in 54 BC. Four hundred years later, Romano British civilization came to an end with the withdrawal of Roman military protection and the onslaught by successive waves of Germanic invasions. Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Norsemen ravaged Britain for almost 500 years. The native Celtic peoples were displaced and driven westward into present-day Wales, where their descendants dwell to this day.

Spartacus is one of the most unusual historical novels of the 20th century and certainly one of the most realistic. In a whirlwind of savagery, despair, and desperation, the listener is suddenly and violently plunged into the great Roman slave revolt of 73 BC. The author, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, does not waste time by slowly setting up his characters, nor in leisurely describing domestic scenes. From the first word, you are literally hurled into the frenetic life of an escaped Greek slave by the name of Kleon.

Trying to squeeze an entire history of Chinese civilization into a brief, one volume account is a formidable task, but one that has succeeded brilliantly here. Hilda Hookham has provided us with a concise story that, while not getting too entangled with personalities and cultural issues, manages to navigate the swirling passage of events that comprise over 3,000 years of Chinese political history.

By the middle of the second century BC, the city of Rome was spiraling toward bankruptcy and moral decay. The generation which had defeated Hannibal and brought the Mediterranean under Roman control had now passed away, even as gold poured in. Hardly a Roman name of any note appears for half a century. The noble Roman has disappeared. The once feared Roman army has become a mere shadow of its former self, and the public have come to accustom themselves to news of shattering defeats.

The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission, was created by congressional legislation and the signature of President George W. Bush in late 2002. This independent, bipartisan commission had the task of producing a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attack, including preparedness and immediate response, and providing recommendations designed to guard against future attacks.

One of the most remarkable historical works of the 19th century came from the pen of French historian Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, a native of Paris. This amazing analysis of family and religious life among the ancient Greeks and Romans is the key to understanding ancient Mediterranean civilizations. The story begins in the misty period of the Bronze Age as the Indo-Europeans began to filter down into the Italian and Greek peninsulas. They brought with them a patriarchy that was based on ancestor worship and the veneration of hearth gods.

The Byzantine Empire survived as a self-contained political entity longer than any other in the history of Christianity. This history by Charles Oman is a catalog of good, bad, and indifferent emperors who either pushed Byzantine Civilization to new heights or savagely drove it to defeat and dissolution. It is a strange tale populated by some of the most interesting men and women who have ever lived.

If you want to understand the daily life and psychology of the late Middle Ages, Ronald Ecker’s classic translation of The Canterbury Tales provides one of the very best means of doing so. Within its audio is to be found a broad range of society - high and low, male and female, rich and poor - who express their innermost beliefs and extravagant fantasies in a series of stories they tell as they make their way to Canterbury Cathedral.

The 19th century witnessed some of the most far-reaching social and political changes in English history. In volume 4, we trace the arc of England's march to worldwide imperial dominance along with the nation's reckoning with her poorest citizens. It is a story of contrast and courage. The contrast is between those with titles, money, and power...and those lacking any or all of these.

The Goths are the most enigmatic of all the ancient German tribes. Their name today is still widely in use for a variety of cultural and artistic movements. But unlike other famous German tribes whose names are still descriptive of nations they founded - the Franks, the Lombards, the Angles, the Saxons and the Alemanni - the Goths simply disappeared. The subject of Henry Bradley's splendid short history is tracing the rise, the migrations, and the impact of the Goths on European history along with their spectacular fall.

Vanity Fair is a satirical novel of manners which takes place during, and in the decade after, the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The various scenes in the novel range across Europe and England. It was first published in serial form beginning in 1847. The work is by turns witty, scintillating, brutally realistic, tragic, humorous, and always fascinating. The title of the book stems from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”, where Vanity is a town along the pilgrim’s route, and which holds an eternal fair of the vanities. It is a place where people are ensnared by worldly things.

Dickens never employed greater skill or more consummate craftsmanship on any other of his works than he did on A Tale of Two Cities, his magnificent historical novel set during the turbulent era marking the end of Louis XVI's reign. His passionate portrayal of the lives of two groups, one English, one French, caught up in the net of revolutionary intrigue and cruelty, has never been equalled. The novel depicts the plight of the French peasantry demoralized by the French aristocracy.

The Fate of Empires analyzes many of the commonly held traits of the world’s historic empires and demonstrates how the presence or absence of these can determine the outcome of these societies. The author isolates two main forces operating in advanced civilizations: the urge to reproduce as well as competition among members of society.

No era in world history has fascinated us more than that of the Roman Empire, especially when it was at its height. The period known as the Pax Romana is generally agreed to have occurred between Octavian's defeat of Mark Antony at Actium in 27 B.C. to the death of Marcus Aurelius in A.D.180. During this 227-year period, most of the sharp military conflict was confined to the periphery of the empire, though the civil war kicked off during the Year of the Four Emperors in 68/69 was a glaring exception to this "universal" peace.

The March of Muscovy begins with a strange, exotic narrative of an isolated, primitive Slavic people living alongside an insignificant river on the edge of the great Eurasian forest belt. Lamb has skillfully called forth the voices of contemporary visitors, merchants, Cossack explorers, diplomats from far away European courts, exiled priests, and the words from among the most acute Russian observers themselves. Lamb has a way of breathing life into the past, of combining the best of scholarly research with an artistic vitality and narrative velocity.

A history of the Crusades. Out of the chaos of Muslim tribal warfare and regional animosity arose a military genius such as Islam had never known: Saladin. Uniting the sultanates of Cairo and Damascus, Saladin created a single powerful state. Luring the crusaders into an ill-considered confrontation, he destroyed their army at the Battle of Hattin in 1187, leaving the few remaining crusaders clinging perilously to a series of towns and forts along the Levantine coast. Into this desperate situation stepped the most formidable warrior of the age, Richard the Lion-Hearted.

Suleiman the Magnificent is the story of the Ottoman Turks' greatest leader. He came to power at the early age of 25 in 1520. Before his death in 1566, he had altered the power structure and geography of Eastern Europe, and Turkey had become the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean. Suleiman's reign would mark the high tide of Turkish power in Asia Minor and Europe.