Charles River Editors

The World War II era produced many leaders of titanic determination, men whose strengths and weaknesses left an extraordinary imprint on historical affairs....

In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party took absolute control of Germany, and his new regime was known as the Third Reich (Third Empire)....

Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz died almost 200 years ago, yet he remains one of the most important and influential of all military thinkers. His teachings combined strategy with military knowledge to produce a dialectic approach to the philosophy of warfare....

The history of Ukraine is a fascinating story of how cultures, political systems, religions, and power have met, intersected, morphed, and expanded....

 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....

Queen Victoria’s Army: The History of the British Army During the Victorian Era examines the history of the British army in the late 19th century. You will learn about the British army during the Victorian Era like never before....

Yugoslavia was arguably one of the most unusual geopolitical creations of the 20th century. The Yugoslav state had never existed in any historical sense, and the ties that bound together its constituent peoples were tenuous at best. Listen to learn more about Yugoslavia....

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.... 

John Dee was one of the greatest scientific minds of his time, but also one of the most controversial. He was a learned man in fields as varied as mathematics and astronomy, centuries before they became formalized fields of study, but he is remembered for performing magic and alchemy....

The Balkan area has historically been one of the world’s most combustible regions. Home to several national groups and at a crossroads of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, the Balkans have exerted an outsized role on world affairs....

Of all the peoples of the ancient Near East, the Phoenicians are among the most recognizable but also perhaps the least understood...

The world is filled with mysteries, and even in the modern age, much of the planet remains unexplored. The depths of the oceans and the intricate and extensive cave systems that honeycomb some parts of the Earth are still largely unknown....

For nearly 5,000 years, the sands of the Iraqi desert have held the remains of the oldest known civilization: the Sumerians....

The legendary Carthaginian general Hannibal brought the Romans to their knees for over a decade during the Second Punic War....

The year 1815 marked the beginning of a time of repression in Europe. Napoleon Bonaparte had been defeated at Waterloo and sent to the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena, the torrent of blood unleashed by the French Revolution had finally run dry....

The conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians is technically 69 years old and counting but has its roots in over 2,000 years of history. With so much time and history, the Middle East peace process has become laden with unique, politically sensitive concepts like the right of return....

The vast expanses of southern Russia and the Ukraine provided the Eastern Front arena where the armies of Hitler and Stalin wrestled lethally for supremacy in 1943....

For several centuries, fishermen on Lake Nemi in Italy could see ship wreckage on the floor of the lake, and in 1928, under the patronage of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini....

The Dreyfus Affair: The History and Legacy of France’s Most Notorious Antisemitic Political Scandal examines the chain of events that produced one of the most notorious episodes in modern French history....

In the wake of World War II, the European continent was devastated, and the conflict left the Soviet Union and the United States as uncontested superpowers. This ushered in over 45 years of the Cold War, and a political alignment of Western democracies against the Communist Soviet bloc....