Modern

The name Captain James Cook is one of the most recognisable in Australian history - an almost mythic figure who is often discussed, celebrated, reviled and debated....

The mutiny on HMS Bounty, in the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, is one of history's truly great stories - a tale of human drama, intrigue and adventure of the highest order - and in the hands of Peter FitzSimons it comes to life as never before. Commissioned by the Royal Navy to collect breadfruit plants from Tahiti and take them to the West Indies, the Bounty's crew found themselves in a tropical paradise. Five months later, they did not want to leave.

The iconic Australian exploration story - brought to life by Peter FitzSimons, Australia's storyteller....

The first comprehensive biography of the godfather of Australian bushranging–Frank Gardiner–leader of the Lachlan gang and mastermind of the largest gold heist in Australian history.

The Anarchy tells the remarkable story of how one of the world’s most magnificent empires disintegrated and came to be replaced by a dangerously unregulated private company....

GCHQ is the largest and most secretive intelligence organisation in the UK, and has existed for 100 years - but we still know next to nothing about it....

Late one evening investigative journalist Bastian Obermayer receives an anonymous message offering him access to secret data....

A number-one New York Times best seller and arguably the best business narrative ever written, Barbarians at the Gate is the classic account of the fall of RJR Nabisco....

In December 1937, in the capital of China, one of the most brutal massacres in the long annals of wartime barbarity occurred.

The British Secret Service has been cloaked in secrecy and shrouded in myth since it was created 100 years ago. MI6 provides a unique and unprecedented insight into this secret world and the reality that lies behind the fiction....

Night is an unmistakably autobiographical account of the author's own gruesome experiences in Nazi Germany's death camps....

J. Robert Oppenheimer, an iconic figure of the 20th century, was a brilliant physicist who led efforts to build an atomic bomb but later confronted the moral consequences of scientific progress....

In the darkest moment of history, one child found the courage and strength to survive the unimaginable. This is Henry’s true story....

In 1864, Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of Auckland Island....

Now available in audio for the first time, Christopher R. Browning’s shocking account of how a unit of average middle-aged Germans became the cold-blooded murderers of tens of thousands of Jews - now with a new afterword and additional photographs....

This history of modern Iran is not a survey in the conventional sense but an ambitious exploration of the story of a nation. It offers a revealing look at how events, people, and institutions are shaped by currents that sometimes reach back hundreds of years....

The final volume in Richard J. Evans’s masterly trilogy on the history of Nazi Germany....

From age 15 to 40, David Hackworth devoted himself to the US Army and fast became a living legend. In 1971, however, he appeared on television to decry the doomed war effort in Vietnam....

Corrie ten Boom was a Dutch watchmaker who became a heroine of the Resistance, a survivor of Hitler's concentration camps, and one of the most remarkable evangelists of the 20h century....

A literally world-changing book, Darwin put forward the anti-religious and scientific idea that humans in fact evolved over millions of generations from animals....

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from 20 countries, ranging as far back as the 18th century, to uncover key economic and social patterns....

Funny and exciting,Carnivore offers fresh insight into the mind and heart of a warrior and offers a look at the lives of troops on the ground not seen before....

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

Drawing on previously unpublished eyewitness accounts, prizewinning historian Donald L. Miller has written what critics are calling one of the most powerful accounts of warfare ever published....

The untold story of a heroic band of Caribbean pirates whose defiance of imperial rule inspired revolt in colonial outposts across the world....

This groundbreaking international bestseller lays to rest many myths about the Holocaust: that Germans were ignorant of the mass destruction of Jews, that the killers were all SS men, and that those who slaughtered Jews did so reluctantly. Hitler's Willing Executioners provides conclusive evidence that the extermination of European Jewry engaged the energies and enthusiasm of tens of thousands of ordinary Germans.

We live in an age that seems eerily familiar. A time of dictators, populists, organised lying, European wars, grabs for territory, ideological extremism and even antisemitism, a time when things are falling apart and the centre is struggling to hold. It has all happened before, in the 1920s and 1930s. History is sending us a warning, and unless we heed it, history will have its revenge as we repeat the disaster of the 1940s. The world needs to learn the lessons of these decades, and fast.

From the former USA Today journalist and author of The Chosen Few, the untold story of The Battle of Ramadi, which led to a war that would last seven years, claim thousands of lives and evolve into a traumatic legacy for the US military and its veterans.

On November 29, 1943, as the Allies’ primary leaders met in Tehran, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt described to Soviet leader Joseph Stalin his idea for the organization that would become the United Nations. The American president suggested that the active arm of the organization be “the Four Policemen”: the U.S., USSR, UK, and China. Stalin agreed with much of the framework in principle, but asserted that China likely would not possess the strength after the war to assist.

Step into the stories that shaped our world. *Echoes of Change* is a captivating podcast series that takes you on a journey through the defining moments of the 20th and early 21st centuries. From the ashes of World War I to the digital revolutions of today, this series unravels the events, decisions, and figures that have transformed societies, economies, and global dynamics.

The regiment’s career commenced with an ignominious defeat in its initial engagement on the South Carolina coast at Port Royal Sound in 1861. This demoralizing event could have set the regiment on a trajectory of self-fulfilling failure and catastrophe.

In 2006, the shock and awe campaign of securing the major cities had ended, and the Iraq War had moved into an alien phase for the operators of Black Flag One. With their motto “swift, silent, deadly,” the Marine operators of 2nd Reconnaissance Battalion were trained for unconventional warfare but they were tasked with holding and securing swathes of the country, facing Insurgents who were adapting their tactics to kill as many Coalition soldiers as possible using IEDs.

From the Revolutionary War to his death in 1831, James Monroe's life was dominated by partisan politics. Monroe not uniquely among the American founders hated political parties, even writing that he "always considered their existence as the curse of the country." Yet his career saw the rise, fall, and rebirth of American political parties.

Following the Front is a compilation of WWII dispatches written by Sidney A. Olson for TIME and LIFE magazines, 1944-1945. Olson, who joined Time Inc. in 1939 and served as a senior editor there, asked to be assigned overseas as a war correspondent. In mid-December, 1944, he received his accreditation from the War Department and sailed for London. Attached to the European Theater of Operations (ETO), Olson followed the Allied Forces as they pushed the Nazis back into Germany. He typed up his reports and cabled them to his editors in New York.

In the wake of the Nazi invasion of Europe, the tentative sparks of resistance in occupied countries were fanned by Britain's Special Operations Executive. Across the continent, SOE recruited women to "set Europe ablaze." Working as secret agents and saboteurs, these individuals bolstered resistance from within and provided much needed support and weapons. F Section's actions in France are renowned, and today some operatives have become household names.

The revolutions that raged across Europe and the Americas over seven decades, from 1760 to 1825, created the modern world. Revolutionaries shattered empires, toppled social hierarchies, and birthed a world of republics. But old injustices lingered on and the powerful engines of revolutionary change created new and insidious forms of inequality. In The Age of Revolutions, historian Nathan Perl-Rosenthal offers the first narrative history of this entire era.

Unshackled: A Journey Through the History of Mental Health takes listeners on an immersive narrative through the fascinating, often unsettling, evolution of mental health treatment—from medieval superstition and asylums to modern understanding and compassion. Through vivid storytelling and deeply human portraits, this book uncovers the true stories of individuals who shaped—and were shaped by—the changing tides of mental healthcare. Meet Margery Kempe, whose visions blurred madness and sainthood, and Dorothea Dix, whose relentless advocacy transformed mental institutions forever.

"Sin City Secrets: The Mobsters Who Shaped Las Vegas" delves into the intricate relationship between organized crime and the development of Las Vegas, revealing how mobsters influenced the city's transformation into a gambling mecca. The book is structured in five parts, each chronicling different eras of mob involvement in Las Vegas from the 1920s to the present day. Part 1 explores the origins of organized crime during Prohibition, highlighting figures like Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill, who played pivotal roles in establishing criminal networks that would later target Las Vegas.

Now, the fruits of Chas Henry's exhaustive four-year, two-continent investigation provide insight into what many have called the United States Marine Corps' worst-ever peacetime disaster. Fuji Fire shares the compelling and intimate stories of heartbreak and inspiration forged by these events while bringing to light new, critical analyses of the incident's causes and effects.

From the streets of Petrograd during the heady autumn of 1917, to Mao's stunning victory in October 1949, and Fidel's triumphant arrival in Havana, in January 1959, the history of the twentieth century was transformed in dramatic and profound ways by the Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions. Here, the stories of these epoch-defining events are told together for the first time. At the heart of each revolution was an epic journey: Lenin's 1917 return to Russia from exile in Switzerland; Mao's 'Long March' of 1934-35, covering some 6,000 miles across China; and Fidel Castro's return to Cuba.