Smithsonian: 207 books
History of the Space Shuttle, Volume Two
Development of the Space Shuttle, 1972-1981
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2014
Basing his work on virtually untapped NASA archives, T. A. Heppenheimer has produced the second volume of his definitive history of the space shuttle. Volume Two traces the development of the shuttle through a decade of engineering setbacks and breakthroughs, program-management challenges, and political...
Time and Navigation
The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There
Language: English
Release Date: June 2, 2015
If you want to know where you are, you need a good clock. The surprising connection between time and place is explored in Time and Navigation: The Untold Story of Getting from Here to There, the companion book to the National Air and Space Museum exhibition of the same name.
Today we use...
Tupperware
The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America
Language: English
Release Date: September 30, 2014
From Wonder Bowls to Ice-Tup molds to Party Susans, Tupperware has become an icon of suburban living. Tracing the fortunes of Earl Tupper's polyethylene containers from early design to global distribution, Alison J. Clarke explains how Tupperware tapped into potent commercial and social forces, becoming...
Visions of a Flying Machine
The Wright Brothers and the Process of Invention
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2014
This acclaimed book on the Wright Brothers takes the reader straight to the heart of their remarkable achievement, focusing on the technology and offering a clear, concise chronicle of precisely what they accomplished and how they did it. This book deals with the process of the invention of the airplane...
The Shackled Continent
Power, Corruption, and African Lives
Language: English
Release Date: October 5, 2010
A former Africa editor for The Economist, Robert Guest addresses the troubled continent's thorniest problems: war, AIDS, and above all, poverty. Newly updated with a preface that considers political and economic developments of the past six years, The Shackled Continentis engrossing, highly readable,...
Mustang Designer
Edgar Schmued and the P-51
Language: English
Release Date: December 2, 2014
Mustang Designer tells the story of American wartime fighter development, including engines and armaments, as part of a nationwide program of aircraft builders and fliers, focusing on Edgar Schmued, the designer of the Mustang. The P-51 Mustang is widely regarded as the best propeller-driven fighter...
Lapps and Labyrinths
Saami Prehistory, Colonization, and Cultural Resilience
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2013
Professor Noel D. Broadbent is one of Sweden's foremost experts on north Swedish archaeology and literally wrote the book on the prehistory of the Skellefteå region on the North Bothnian coast. This knowledge is now brought to bear on the issue of Saami origins. The focus is on the successful adaptive...
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Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2013
Language: English
Release Date: October 30, 2013
This ninth volume of the Artefacts series explores how artists have responded to developments in science and technology, past and present. Rather than limiting the discussion to art alone, editors Anne Collins Goodyear and Margaret Weitekamp also asked contributors to consider aesthetics: the scholarly...
History from Things
Essays on Material Culture
Language: English
Release Date: June 4, 2013
* History from Things* explores the many ways objects—defined broadly to range from Chippendale tables and Italian Renaissance pottery to seventeenth-century parks and a New England cemetery—can reconstruct and help reinterpret the past. Eighteen essays describe how to “read” artifacts,...
by G. Kurt Piehler
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: October 28, 2014
Wars do not fully end when the shooting stops. As G. Kurt Piehler reveals in this book, after every conflict from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War, Americans have argued about how and for what deeds and heroes wars should be remembered.
Drawing on sources ranging from government documents...
Inventing New England
Regional Tourism in the Nineteenth Century
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2014
Quaint, charming, nostalgic New England: rustic fishing villages, romantic seaside cottages, breathtaking mountain vistas, peaceful rural settings. In Inventing New England, Dona Brown traces the creation of these calendar-page images and describes how tourism as a business emerged and came to shape...
The Story of Science: Aristotle Leads the Way
Aristotle Leads the Way
Language: English
Release Date: April 26, 2016
Readers will travel back in time to ancient Babylonia, Egypt, and Greece. They will meet the world's first astronomers, mathematicians, and physicists and explore the lives and ideas of such famous people as Pythagoras, Archimedes, Brahmagupta, al-Khwarizmi, Fibonacci, Ptolemy, St. Augustine, and...
When Humans Nearly Vanished
The Catastrophic Explosion of the Toba Volcano
Language: English
Release Date: October 16, 2018
The fascinating true story of the explosion of the Mount Toba supervolcano--the Earth's largest eruption in the past 28 million years--and its lasting impact on Earth and human evolution
Some 73,000 years ago, the huge dome of Mount Toba, in today's Sumatra, Indonesia, began to rumble. A deep...
by Stephen E. Weil
Language: English
Release Date: December 17, 2014
Language: English
Release Date: December 17, 2014
In these 19 insightful and frequently witty meditations, Stephen E. Weil examines the purposes and functions of the museum in the late 20th century, proposing museums make encounters with a variety of visitors more central to their operation.