The Ditching of Flying Tiger 923 and the Desperate Struggle for Survival
September 1962: On a moonless night over the raging Atlantic Ocean, a thousand miles from land, the engines of Flying Tiger flight 923 to Germany burst into flames, one by one.
Pilot John Murray didn’t have long before the plane crashed headlong into the 20-foot waves at 120 mph.
As America's oldest merchant ship still afloat and the only wooden survivor of the once-vital whaling industry, the Charles W. Morgan has a complex story to tell. Elaborating on earlier volumes on the ship's history at Mystic Seaport Museum, this new book offers an expanded account, chronicling the ship's construction and launch in 1841 through ......
The Inside Story of Y2K Panic and the Greatest Cooperative Effort Ever
The new millennium. The Year 2000. Beyond Mayan prophecies, a more immediate danger loomed: Two-digit year date fields had been used by software programmers to conserve expensive computer storage space for decades. As a consequence, legacy systems reading "00" on January 1, 2000 would most probably interpret the date as 1900. ......
Shattering the Delusion That Science Underlies Our Transportation System
In the US we are nearing four million road deaths since we began counting them in 1899. The numbers are getting worse in recent years, yet we continue to accept these deaths as part of doing business. There has been no examination of why we engineer roads that are literally killing us. Fixing the carnage on our roads requires a change in mindset ......
A timely collection of essays on the pressing possibilities and risks of gene-editing technology. Scientists and genetic engineers are becoming increasingly adept at editing the human genome. How far can-and should-they go in editing future generations? In The Promise and Peril of CRISPR, editor Neal Baer brings together a timely collection of ......
How Marginalized American Motorists Fought to Drive and Park
Car ownership is central to the U.S. culture wars about global warming and urban sprawl. While the environmental issues surrounding car use are well known, the car is also the focus of debates about urban redevelopment, racially biased policing, women's employment, immigration, homelessness, and disability rights. Right to the Road: How ......
The fascinating history of the St. Louis Bridge, the first steel structure in the world.
In Spanning the Gilded Age, John K. Brown tells the daring, improbable story of the construction of the St. Louis Bridge, known popularly as the Eads Bridge. Completed in 1874, it was the first structure of any ......
Redefines modern lyric poetry at the intersection of literary and media studies. In The Lyre Book, Matthew Kilbane urges literary scholars to consider lyric not as a genre or a reading practice but as a media condition: the generative tension between writing and sound. In addition to clarifying issues central to the study of modern ......
The most prolific inventor in American history, Thomas Edison played a major role in creating industries that have altered life around the globe: electric light and power, recorded sound and motion pictures. He also made significant innovations in telecommunications, battery technology, office machinery, the manufacture of Portland Cement, and ......