Engineering is where human knowledge meets real-world problems—and solves them. It's the source of some of our greatest inventions, from the catapult to the jet engine. Marshall Brain, creator of the How Stuff Works series and a professor at the Engineering Entrepreneurs Program at NCSU, provides a detailed look at 250 milestones in the discipline. He covers the various areas, including chemical, aerospace, and computer engineering, from

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In the Age of Industrialization, economics, society, politics, and culture collided. In particular, the Industrial Revolution provided the underpinnings of Europe's societal transformations and decisively shaped the century, including changes in mass culture and the growth of democtratic challenges to existing political institutions. Popiel explores specific technologies, most of which we take for granted today, to offer a general picture of the economic...

In the second "Sapiens" volume, Yuval Noah Harari tells the story of how we took over the world; how an unlikely marriage between a god and a bureaucrat created the first empires; and how war, famine, disease, and inequality became a part of the human condition. The origins of modern farming are introduced through Elizabethan tragedy, the changing fortunes of domesticated plants and animals are tracked in the columns of the Daily Business News, and...