Showing results for "America" in History & Culture

Early True Believers: The Untold Story of Silicon Alley is a 1990s saga of ambition and innovation set in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, a swath of downtown that served as New York City’s nerve center of tech entrepreneurship. The series features the stories of a forgotten cohort of early internet visionaries, countercultural social networks, the digital gold rush, and the lavish events that came with it, including one held in an underground Tribeca bunker that abruptly ended in a police raid—a harbinger of the upheaval to come.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.

The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software or the story of the Internet or the story of "smart" handheld devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of digital technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing's technological development.

An illustrated history of American innovators—some well known, some unknown, and all fascinating—by the author of the bestselling The American Century. The real inventor of the steam engine. The creator of the bra. The man who invented modern banking. The creator of the computer operating...

The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), designed to quickly deliver thermonuclear weapons to distant targets, was the central weapons system of the Cold War. ICBMs also carried the first astronauts and cosmonauts into orbit. More than a generation later, we are still living with the political, technological, and scientific effects of the space race, while nuclear-armed ICBMs remain on alert and in the headlines around the world. Christopher Gainor explores the US Air Force's decision, in March 1954, to build the Atlas, America's first ICBM.

Physical infrastructure in the United States is crumbling. The American Society of Civil Engineers has, in its latest report, given American roads and bridges a grade of D and C+, respectively, and has described roughly 65,000 bridges in the United States as 'structurally deficient'. This crisis - and one need look no further than the I-35W bridge collapse in Minnesota to see that it is indeed a crisis - shows little sign of abating short of a massive change in attitude amongst politicians and the American public.

As NASA prepared for the launch of Apollo 11 in July 1969, many African American leaders protested the billions of dollars used to fund "space joyrides" rather than help tackle poverty, inequality, and discrimination at home. This volume examines such tensions as well as the ways in which NASA's goal of space exploration aligned with the cause of racial equality. It provides new insights into the complex relationship between the space program and the civil rights movement in the Jim Crow South and abroad.

This is the story of how America's first women soldiers helped win World War I, earned the vote, and fought the US Army. In 1918 the US Army Signal Corps sent 223 women to France. They were masters of the latest technology: the telephone switchboard. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, demanded female "wire experts" when he discovered that inexperienced doughboys were unable to keep him connected with troops under fire.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER The internet as we know it is broken. Here’s how we can seize back control of our lives from the corporate algorithms and create a better internet—before it’s too late. “In the spirit of Thomas Paine’s Revolution-era Common Sense, this manifesto challenges us to...

Motivated by the idea of turning Flushing Meadows, literally a land of refuse, into his greatest public park, Robert Moses—New York's "master builder"—brought the World's Fair to the Big Apple for 1964 and '65. Though considered a financial failure, the 1964/65 World's Fair was a sixties flash point in areas from politics to pop culture, technology to urban planning, and civil rights to violent crime. In an epic narrative, Tomorrow-Land shows the astonishing pivots taken by New York City, America, and the world during the fair.

Best-selling author Newt Gingrich proposes a bold vision ofthe future: America is on the cusp of a renaissance, a new birth of technological and scientific innovation that will dramatically transform the prosperity and quality of life of every American. Our biggest enemy? Special interest groups, powerful lobbyists, and government bureaucrats who aredetermined to squash, control, or prevent these innovations - and permanently change the future of America.

The history of the American gun is intricately entwined with the history of America itself, and the potential future developments in gun technology could change the world. However, the radical anti-gun lobby stands between innovation and the American people. Bestselling author Frank Miniter describes amazing breakthroughs waiting to happen in gun technology - and how gun grabbers threaten to stop progress in its tracks.

The summer of 1969 saw astronauts land on the moon for the first time and hippie hordes descend on Woodstock for a legendary music festival. For Neil M. Maher, the conjunction of these two era-defining events is not entirely coincidental. With its lavishly funded mandate to send a man to the moon, Apollo became a litmus test in the 1960s culture wars.