Smithsonian: 207 books
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...
To Fill the Skies with Pilots
The Civilian Pilot Training Program, 1939-1946
Language: English
Release Date: June 3, 2014
Launched in 1939, the Civilian Pilot Training Program (CPTP) was one of the largest government-sponsored vocational education programs of its time. In To Fill the Skies with Pilots, Dominick A. Pisano explores the successes and failures of the program, from its conception as a hybrid civilian-military...
John Glenn
America's Astronaut
Language: English
Release Date: April 15, 2014
In February 1962, he became the first American to orbit the Earth. Since then John Herschel Glenn Jr. has stood in the popular imagination as a quintessentially American hero. In John Glenn: America's Astronaut, a special edition e-book featuring 45 stunning photographs as well as a video, Chaikin...
We Have Capture
Tom Stafford and the Space Race
Language: English
Release Date: January 14, 2014
What an amazing career. Tom Stafford attained the highest speed ever reached by a test pilot (28,547 mph), carried a cosmonaut’s coffin with Soviet Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, led the team that designed the sequence of missions leading to the original lunar landing, and drafted the original specifications...
At the Edge of Space
The X-15 Flight Program
Language: English
Release Date: August 6, 2013
In At the Edge of Space, Milton O. Thompson tells the dramatic story of one of the most successful research aircraft ever flown. The first full-length account of the X-15 program, the book profiles the twelve test pilots (Neil Armstrong, Joe Engle, Scott Crossfield, and the author among them) chosen...