Showing results by narrator "DOUGLAS R PRATT" in All Categories

GPS Declassified examines the development of GPS from its secret, cold war military roots to its emergence as a worldwide consumer industry. Drawing on previously unexplored documents, the authors examine how military rivalries influenced the creation of GPS and shaped public perceptions about its origin. Told by a son of a Navy insider and a science and technology journalist, the story chronicles the research and technological advances required for the development of GPS.

Buster Keaton (1895-1966) was a brilliant comedian and filmmaker who conceived, wrote, directed, acted, and even edited most of his ten feature films and nineteen short comedies, which are perhaps the finest silent pictures ever made. With a face of stone and a mind that engineered breathtakingly intricate moments of slapstick, Keaton has become an icon of the American cinema. Marion Meade's definitive biography explores his often brutal childhood acting experiences, the making of his masterpieces, his shame at his own lack of education, his life-threatening alcoholism, and his turbulent marriages.

From the joyous communal connections fostered through shared auditory experience to the devastating impact of noise pollution in the deep sea, musician and author Damon Krukowski urges readers to reconsider the significance of sound and its role in both our personal and collective well-being. He looks despairingly at how the multipronged efforts of urban dwellers to mitigate city noise have led to increased isolation, loss of community, and a sense of physical detachment from one’s surroundings.

In Eisenhower's Sputnik Moment, Yanek Mieczkowski examines the early history of America's space program, reassessing Eisenhower's leadership. He details how Eisenhower approved breakthrough satellites, supported a new civilian space agency, signed a landmark science education law, and fostered improved relations with scientists. Offering a fast-paced account of this Cold War episode, Mieczkowski demonstrates that Eisenhower built an impressive record in space and on earth.

When the leaders of the French Revolution executed Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette in 1793, they sent a chilling message to the hereditary ruling orders in Europe. Believing that monarchy anywhere presented a threat to democratic rule in France, the leaders of the revolution declared war on European aristocracies, including those of Great Britain. For more than 20 years thereafter, France and England waged a protracted war that ended in British victory.

In US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy, the authors analyze the strategic underpinnings of hegemony, assess the national security establishment that sustains dominance, consider the impact on civil-military relations, and explore the intertwining relationships between foreign policy, defense strategy, and commercial activities.

The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America’s War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. The author relates how radical Patriots secured those four cannon and smuggled them out of Boston, and how Gage sent out spies and search parties to track them down.

Captain Frank Jones, a famed nineteenth-century Texas Ranger, said of his company's top sergeant, Baz Outlaw (1854-1894), "A man of unusual courage and coolness and in a close place is worth two or three ordinary men." Another old-time Texas Ranger declared that Baz Outlaw "was one of the worst and most dangerous" because "he never knew what fear was."

Authors Mark Edward Lender and Garry Wheeler Stone argue that in political terms, the Battle of Monmouth constituted a pivotal moment in the War for Independence. Drawing on a wide range of historical sources—many never before used, including archaeological evidence—Lender and Stone disentangle the true story of Monmouth and provide the most complete and accurate account of the battle, including both American and British perspectives.

America's infrastructureits essential roads, bridges, ports, airports, power grids, and telecommunications systemswere once the pride of the nation and an example for the world. But now, after years of neglect and oversight, this infrastructure is crumbling and causing catastrophic changes in the US quality of life. Build seeks to explain how American infrastructure collapsed and what can be done to repair it.

The career of John Charles Frémont (1813-90) ties together the full breadth of American expansionism from its 18th-century origins through its culmination in the Gilded Age. Tom Chaffin's biography demonstrates Frémont's vital importance to the history of American empire and illuminates his role in shattering long-held myths about the ecology and habitability of the American West.

In Ted W. Lawson’s classic Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Lawson gives a vivid eyewitness account of the unorthodox assignment that 85 intrepid volunteer airmen - the “Tokyo Raiders” - under the command of celebrated flier James H. Doolittle executed in April 1942. The plan called for 16 B-25 twin-engine medium bombers of the Army Air Corps to take off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, bomb industrial targets in Japan, and land at airfields in China.

In recent decades its history has been fabricated from modern myth, romantic fiction, and pure fantasy. Now, for the first time, historical researcher and author Michael Paul Mihaljevich has pieced together the real story of the Bird Cage.

In Night Hunters, air power historian William P. Head provides the first detailed study of the development and deployment of the AC-130 gunship. While other airframes and other types of close air support (CAS) and interdiction weapon systems preceded or flew with the AC-130s, this four-engine cargo airframe proved to be not only the longest serving fixed-wing gunship but also the most effective by far.

Over the last 30 years, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies has grown from a small group of disaffected conservative law students into an organization with extraordinary influence over American law and politics. Although the organization is unknown to the average citizen, this group of intellectuals has managed to monopolize the selection of federal judges, take over the Department of Justice, and control legal policy in the White House.

Charney’s stories and lessons will provide anyone with the necessary investigative skills to look at a landscape, interpret it, and tell its story—from its start as rock or soil to the plants and animals that live on it. Ultimately, Charney argues, by critically engaging with the landscape we will become better at connecting with nature and ourselves.

There is a conventional wisdom about oil that the US military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the "special" relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia. Except, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

The global coffee industry, which fuels the livelihoods of farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers around the world, rests on fragile ecological foundations. In Coffee Is Not Forever, Stuart McCook explores the transnational story of this essential crop through a history of one of its most devastating diseases, the coffee leaf rust. In the process, he illuminates the progress and prognosis of the challenges - especially climate change - that pose an existential threat to a crop that global consumers often take for granted.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

David Forsyth recounts the life of Eben Smith, an integral but little-known figure in Colorado mining history. From Smith’s early years and his labor in the mines, to his rise to prominence as an investor and developer, Forsyth shows how Smith used the mining and milling knowledge he acquired in California to become a leader in technological innovation in Colorado’s mining industry.