Smithsonian Books imprint: 162 books
Translating America
An Ethnic Press and Popular Culture, 1890-1920
Language: English
Release Date: September 29, 2015
At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution...
Amelia Earhart
A Biography
Language: English
Release Date: July 9, 2013
She died mysteriously before she was forty. Yet in the last decade of her life Amelia Earhart soared from obscurity to fame as the best-known female aviator in the world. She set record after record—among them, the first trans-Atlantic solo flight by a woman, a flight that launched Earhart on a...
Cubano Be, Cubano Bop
One Hundred Years of Jazz in Cuba
Language: English
Release Date: June 21, 2016
Based on unprecedented research in Cuba, the direct testimony of scores of Cuban musicians, and the author's unique experience as a prominent jazz musician, Cubano Be, Cubano Bop is destined to take its place among the classics of jazz history. The work pays tribute not only to a distinguished lineage...
The Final Mission of Extortion 17
Special Ops, Helicopter Support, SEAL Team Six, and the Deadliest Day of the U.S. War in Afghanistan
Language: English
Release Date: September 19, 2017
On August 6, 2011, a U.S. Army CH-47D Chinook helicopter approached a landing zone in Afghanistan 40 miles southwest of Kabul. The helicopter, call sign Extortion 17, was on a mission to reinforce American and coalition special operations troops. It would never return. Insurgents fired at the Chinook,...
Fighter Pilot's Heaven
Flight Testing the Early Jets
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2012
Fighter Pilot's Heaven presents the dramatic inside story of the American military's transition into the jet age, as told by a flyer whose life depended on its success. With colorful anecdotes about fellow pilots as well as precise technical information, Donald S. Lopez describes how it was to be...
Call Sign Rustic
The Secret Air War over Cambodia, 1970-1973
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2013
President Richard Nixon could not keep American ground troops in Cambodia beyond June 1970 without authorization from Congress, which was not forthcoming. Not wanting to desert the anti-communist Lon Nol regime, he ordered top-secret, round-the-clock air support over Cambodia, and the Rustics were...
To Hanoi and Back
The U.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966-1973
Language: English
Release Date: July 15, 2014
After nearly eighteen months of the largely unsuccessful bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder, the US Air Force began to look for ways to overcome technological, geographical, and political challenges in North Vietnam and use limited air power more effectively. In 1972 the two Linebacker...
Hat in the Ring
The Birth of American Air Power in the Great War
Language: English
Release Date: January 22, 2013
When Congress declared war in April 1917, the Europeans had already deployed their third generation of fighters, equipped with machine guns and capable of speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour, while the American Air Service consisted of only a handful of aviators in unarmed trainers. In this first...
Last of the Blue and Gray
Old Men, Stolen Glory, and the Mystery That Outlived the Civil War
Language: English
Release Date: October 8, 2013
Richard Serrano, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, pens a story of two veterans. In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital,...
Fair America
World's Fairs in the United States
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Since their inception with New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition in the mid-nineteenth century, world's fairs have introduced Americans to “exotic” pleasures such as belly dancing and the Ferris Wheel; pathbreaking technologies such as telephones and X rays; and futuristic architectural, landscaping,...
Eye in the Sky
The Story of the CORONA Spy Satellites
Language: English
Release Date: May 26, 2015
Presenting the full story of the CORONA spy satellites' origins, Eye in the Sky explores the Cold War technology and far-reaching effects of the satellites on foreign policy and national security. Arguing that satellite reconnaissance was key to shaping the course of the Cold War, the book documents...
by
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2013
Cloth and Human Experience explores a wide variety of cultures and eras, discussing production and trade, economics, and symbolic and spiritual associations.
America Noir
Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era
Language: English
Release Date: June 21, 2016
In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone featured...
The Hold Life Has
Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community
Language: English
Release Date: January 11, 2012
This second edition of Catherine J. Allen's distinctive ethnography of the Quechua-speaking people of the Andes brings their story into the present. She has added an extensive afterword based on her visits to Sonqo in 1995 and 2000 and has updated and revised parts of the original text. The book focuses...