history

Discusses how science helped the Pilgrims make the journey across the ocean and build a new home for themselves in the New World.

Introduces the science behind Shackleton's epic Antarctic journey, and discusses how weather patterns determined the fate of Shackleton's ship, the Endurance, and how the crew used their few resources to survive on the ice.

"When the application for a new sedative called Kevadon--commonly known as thalidomide--landed on Frances Kelsey's desk at the FDA in 1960, it seemed destined to sail through the review process. The drug, billed as entirely risk-free, was already being sold in forty-six countries. But when Kelsey learned that the drug caused terrible birth defects, she and a team of dedicated doctors, parents, and journalists fought Merrell, the drug's American manufacturer, and Chemie-Gruenenthal, the German company founded by former Nazis that first synthesized the drug, to recall the product. It marked a rare victory in America's perennial battle between capitalism and consumer protection"--Provided by publisher.

Discusses how the drug thalidomide created the greatest medical disaster in history and explains how it has made a comeback as a life-saving treatment.

"This book fills the void in Dodgers scholarship, exploring their impact on popular culture, revealing lesser-known details of the team's history"--Provided by publisher.

A decade-by-decade history of stock car racing.

"Celebrating women of color who changed the course of U.S. history, this collection includes contributions by both famous and little-known names with prompts for you to connect your life to theirs to understand their influence and the power of their stories"--Provided by publisher.

"Married foreign correspondents John and Frances Gunther intimately understood that it isn't only impersonal, economic forces that propel history, bringing readers so close to the front lines of history that they could feel how personal pathologies became the stuff of geopolitical crises. Together with other reporters of the Lost Generation--American journalists H.R. Knickerbocker, Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson--the Gunthers slipped through knots of surveillance and ignored orders of expulsion in order to expose the mass executions in Badajoz during the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the millions of dollars that Joseph Goebbels salted away abroad, and the sexual peccadillos of Hitler's brownshirts. They conjured what it was like to ride with Hitler in an airplane ; broke the inside story about Mussolini's claustrophobia and superstitions ; and verified the hypnotic impression Stalin made when he walked into a room. But just as they were transforming journalism, it was also transforming them: who they loved and betrayed, how they raised their children and coped with death. Over the course of their careers they would popularize bringing the private life into public view, not only in their reporting on the outsized figures of their day, but in what they revealed about their own (and each other's) intimate experiences as well"--Provided by publisher.

"A collection of humorous essays with a . . . narrative thread relating the stories of notable women throughout history who dressed as men to get what they wanted or needed, complete with a four-color portrait of each woman"--Provided by publisher.

". . . [argues] that First Amendment rights have often been curtailed in efforts to block progress, and that current measures to reduce hurtful language and to end hate speech could backfire on those who promote them. To those who see free speech as a threat to democracy, Finan offers . . . evidence from a long and sometimes challenging history of free speech in America to show how free speech has been essential to expanding democracy"--Provided by publisher.