Poplorica

Poplorica PDF Author: Martin J. Smith
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060535326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Pop culture meets pop reference in this irreverent tour of twenty unlikely events, innovations, and individuals that forever changed how we live today -- the food we eat, the places we live, the love we make, the fads we follow, the clothes we wear, the products we buy, and much more. Veteran journalists Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger make the offbeat their beat, revealing the odd, surprising, and amusing origins of inexplicable cultural phenomena. From slam dunks to rock 'n' roll punks, permanent press to pantyhose, black velvet painting to point-click culture, high-tech diapers to low-brow entertainment -- they cover sports, business, music, media, film, fashion, and science, and explain a lot about why life today is so weird: If homeowners hate yardwork, why do most suburban homes have lawns? In the best-fed country on earth, how did thin become "in"? When did the "convenience" of convenience food become more important than the food? Was the sexual revolution really sparked by the disastrous honeymoon of a science geek? Why are today's multimillion-dollar design and marketing plans for cars based on the biggest failure in automotive history? How did the invention of air conditioning radically rebalance political power and affect the paths of presidents? The untold, unexpected, sometimes unholy stories are here, providing instant inside knowledge and richly entertaining insights into how and why we live as we do.

Poplorica

Poplorica PDF Author: Martin J. Smith
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060535326
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Pop culture meets pop reference in this irreverent tour of twenty unlikely events, innovations, and individuals that forever changed how we live today -- the food we eat, the places we live, the love we make, the fads we follow, the clothes we wear, the products we buy, and much more. Veteran journalists Martin J. Smith and Patrick J. Kiger make the offbeat their beat, revealing the odd, surprising, and amusing origins of inexplicable cultural phenomena. From slam dunks to rock 'n' roll punks, permanent press to pantyhose, black velvet painting to point-click culture, high-tech diapers to low-brow entertainment -- they cover sports, business, music, media, film, fashion, and science, and explain a lot about why life today is so weird: If homeowners hate yardwork, why do most suburban homes have lawns? In the best-fed country on earth, how did thin become "in"? When did the "convenience" of convenience food become more important than the food? Was the sexual revolution really sparked by the disastrous honeymoon of a science geek? Why are today's multimillion-dollar design and marketing plans for cars based on the biggest failure in automotive history? How did the invention of air conditioning radically rebalance political power and affect the paths of presidents? The untold, unexpected, sometimes unholy stories are here, providing instant inside knowledge and richly entertaining insights into how and why we live as we do.

Kodachrome

Kodachrome PDF Author: Els Rijper
Publisher: Delano Greenridge Editions
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This is a popular visual history of the world from the American perspective from the end of the World War II through 1959. This book shows how our image of lifestyle was formed after the war and how the American point of view in 4-color became our life standard.

Revolutionaries

Revolutionaries PDF Author: Jack Rakove
Publisher: HMH
ISBN: 054748674X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 501

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Book Description
“[A] wide-ranging and nuanced group portrait of the Founding Fathers” by a Pulitzer Prize winner (The New Yorker). In the early 1770s, the men who invented America were living quiet, provincial lives in the rustic backwaters of the New World, devoted to family and the private pursuit of wealth and happiness. None set out to become “revolutionary.” But when events in Boston escalated, they found themselves thrust into a crisis that moved quickly from protest to war. In Revolutionaries, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian shows how the private lives of these men were suddenly transformed into public careers—how Washington became a strategist, Franklin a pioneering cultural diplomat, Madison a sophisticated constitutional thinker, and Hamilton a brilliant policymaker. From the Boston Tea Party to the First Continental Congress, from Trenton to Valley Forge, from the ratification of the Constitution to the disputes that led to our two-party system, Rakove explores the competing views of politics, war, diplomacy, and society that shaped our nation. We see the founders before they were fully formed leaders, as ordinary men who became extraordinary, altered by history. “[An] eminently readable account of the men who led the Revolution, wrote the Constitution and persuaded the citizens of the thirteen original states to adopt it.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Superb . . . a distinctive, fresh retelling of this epochal tale . . . Men like John Dickinson, George Mason, and Henry and John Laurens, rarely leading characters in similar works, put in strong appearances here. But the focus is on the big five: Washington, Franklin, John Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton. Everyone interested in the founding of the U.S. will want to read this book.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

The 12 Most Amazing American Inventions

The 12 Most Amazing American Inventions PDF Author: Rebecca Rowell
Publisher: Amazing America
ISBN: 9781632350084
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Includes facts on the top 12 inventions of America, from the lightbulb to basketball and blue jeans to the personal computer.--

World's Great Men of Color, Volume II

World's Great Men of Color, Volume II PDF Author: J.A. Rogers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 145160307X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 598

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Book Description
An eye-opening account of the great black personalities of world history. In this first volume: outstanding blacks of Asia and Africa, and historical figures before Christ -- including Akhenaton, Aesop, Hannibal, Cleopatra, Zenobia, Askia the Great, the Mahdi, Samuel Adjai Crowther, and many more. World's Great Men of Color is a comprehensive account of the great Black personalities in world history. J. A. Rogers was one of the first Black scholars to devote most of his life to researching the lives of hundreds of men and women of color. This first volume is a convenient reference; equipped with a comprehensive introduction, it treats all aspects of recorded Black history. J. A. Rogers's book is vital reading for everyone who wants a fuller and broader understanding of the great personalities who have shaped our world. The companion volume covers the great Blacks of Europe, South and Central America, the West Indies, and the United States, including Marcus Garvey, Robert Browning, Dom Pedro, Alexandre Dumas, Joachim Murat, Aleksander Sergeevich Pushkin, Alessandro de' Medici, St. Benedict the Moor, and many others.

A Popular History of American Invention

A Popular History of American Invention PDF Author: Waldemar Kaempffert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 586

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Book Description


United States Reports

United States Reports PDF Author: United States. Supreme Court
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law reports, digests, etc
Languages : en
Pages : 840

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Book Description


The Heroes of American Invention

The Heroes of American Invention PDF Author: Lyon Sprague De Camp
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781566193993
Category : Inventions
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
"Heroes of American Invention" is the story of the careers and works of several outstanding inventors. Here you will meet some of the most extraordinary men of all time including Thomas Edison, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Alexander Graham Bell, Samuel Morse, George Westinghouse, Cyrus McCormick, and George Baldwin Selden. These great inventors, working for the most part as individuals in their own small laboratories, accomplished great feats which revolutionized our civilization. "Heroes of American Invention" is the history of those feats and the often dramatic personal lives of those men.

Why We Lie

Why We Lie PDF Author: David Livingstone Smith
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312310400
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Readers of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker will find much to intrigue them in this fascinating book, which declares that our extraordinary ability to deceive others - and even our selves - 'lies' at the heart of our humanity.

The Greatest Invention

The Greatest Invention PDF Author: Silvia Ferrara
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374601631
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
In this exhilarating celebration of human ingenuity and perseverance—published all around the world—a trailblazing Italian scholar sifts through our cultural and social behavior in search of the origins of our greatest invention: writing. The L where a tabletop meets the legs, the T between double doors, the D of an armchair’s oval backrest—all around us is an alphabet in things. But how did these shapes make it onto the page, never mind form complex structures such as this sentence? In The Greatest Invention, Silvia Ferrara takes a profound look at how—and how many times—human beings have managed to produce the miracle of written language, traveling back and forth in time and all across the globe to Mesopotamia, Crete, China, Egypt, Central America, Easter Island, and beyond. With Ferrara as our guide, we examine the enigmas of undeciphered scripts, including famous cases like the Phaistos Disk and the Voynich Manuscript; we touch the knotted, colored strings of the Inca quipu; we study the turtle shells and ox scapulae that bear the earliest Chinese inscriptions; we watch in awe as Sequoyah single-handedly invents a script for the Cherokee language; and we venture to the cutting edge of decipherment, in which high-powered laser scanners bring tears to an engineer’s eye. A code-cracking tour around the globe, The Greatest Invention chronicles a previously uncharted journey, one filled with past flashes of brilliance, present-day scientific research, and a faint, fleeting glimpse of writing’s future.