Blue Sky Metropolis

Blue Sky Metropolis PDF Author: Peter J. Westwick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"Like citrus, oil, movies, radio, and television, aerospace helped create Southern California and embody its values. Blue Sky Metropolis launches an entirely fresh consideration of an iconic industry that answered the immemorial hunger of the human race for flight and the future."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "Blue Sky Metropolis presents an intriguing survey of a unique time in Southern California history, when cheap land and benign weather lured massive aerospace enterprises to the region—eventually serving as home to nearly half of the nation’s defense and space fabricators. Before there was a Silicon Valley, high-tech dreamers were on the loose in the Southland, creating inventions as diverse as the Voyager planetary spacecraft and the Stealth bomber. These highly readable essays help us understand how it happened—how Southern California shaped aerospace, and vice versa."—Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Peter Westwick has assembled a rich collection of essays that tell a wonderful story about the importance of the aerospace industry to Southern California and the importance of Southern California to the aerospace industry. There's technology, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and much more woven through the chapters. It's an ambitious project, but it succeeds in being interesting, informative, and entertaining."—Michael Rich, President and CEO, The RAND Corporation

Blue Sky Metropolis

Blue Sky Metropolis PDF Author: Peter J. Westwick
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Like citrus, oil, movies, radio, and television, aerospace helped create Southern California and embody its values. Blue Sky Metropolis launches an entirely fresh consideration of an iconic industry that answered the immemorial hunger of the human race for flight and the future."--Kevin Starr, University of Southern California "Blue Sky Metropolis presents an intriguing survey of a unique time in Southern California history, when cheap land and benign weather lured massive aerospace enterprises to the region—eventually serving as home to nearly half of the nation’s defense and space fabricators. Before there was a Silicon Valley, high-tech dreamers were on the loose in the Southland, creating inventions as diverse as the Voyager planetary spacecraft and the Stealth bomber. These highly readable essays help us understand how it happened—how Southern California shaped aerospace, and vice versa."—Charles Elachi, Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory "Peter Westwick has assembled a rich collection of essays that tell a wonderful story about the importance of the aerospace industry to Southern California and the importance of Southern California to the aerospace industry. There's technology, sociology, economics, geography, anthropology, and much more woven through the chapters. It's an ambitious project, but it succeeds in being interesting, informative, and entertaining."—Michael Rich, President and CEO, The RAND Corporation

Blue Sky Mansion

Blue Sky Mansion PDF Author: H. Y. Yeang
Publisher: Epigram Books
ISBN: 9814901830
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Blue Sky Mansion tells the tale of Tang Mei Choon, a young girl who was sold into servitude and nearly ends up being entombed alive. She flees with her saviour, a benign gentleman called Chen Tong, to Penang, Malaya, where a new set of troubles arise and threaten her life again.

Stealth

Stealth PDF Author: Peter J. Westwick
Publisher:
ISBN: 0190677449
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
The story behind the technology that revolutionized both aeronautics, and the course of history On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen airplanes appeared in the skies over Baghdad. Or, rather, didn't appear. They arrived in the dark, their black outlines cloaking them from sight. More importantly, their odd, angular shapes, which made them look like flying origami, rendered them undetectable to Iraq's formidable air defenses. Stealth technology, developed during the decades before Desert Storm, had arrived. To American planners and strategists at the outset of the Cold War, this seemingly ultimate way to gain ascendance over the USSR was only a question. What if the United States could defend its airspace while at the same time send a plane through Soviet skies undetected? A craft with such capacity would have to be essentially invisible to radar - an apparently miraculous feat of physics and engineering. In Stealth, Peter Westwick unveils the process by which the impossible was achieved. At heart, Stealth is a tale of two aerospace companies, Lockheed and Northrop, and their fierce competition - with each other and with themselves - to obtain what was estimated one of the largest procurement contracts in history. Westwick's book fully explores the individual and collective ingenuity and determination required to make these planes and in the process provides a fresh view of the period leading up to the end of the Soviet Union. Taking into account the role of technology, as well as the art and science of physics and engineering, Westwick offers an engaging narrative, one that immerses readers in the race to produce a weapon that some thought might save the world, and which certainly changed it.

The Architecture of Industry

The Architecture of Industry PDF Author: Mathew Aitchison
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317044800
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
From the Rust Belt to Silicon Valley, the intersection between architecture and industry has provided a rich and evolving source for historians of architecture. In a historical context, industrial architecture evokes the smoking factories of the nineteenth century or Fordist production complexes of the twentieth century. This book documents the changing nature of industrial building and planning from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Drawing on research from the United States, Europe and Australia, this collection of essays highlights key moments in industrial architecture and planning representative of the wider paradigms in the field. Areas of analysis include industrial production, factories, hydroelectricity, aerospace, logistics, finance, scientific research and mining. The selected case studies serve to highlight architectural and planning innovations in industry and their contributions to wider cultural and societal currents. This richly illustrated collection will be of interest for a wide range of built environment studies, incorporating findings from both historical and theoretical scholarship and design research.

Transborder Los Angeles

Transborder Los Angeles PDF Author: Yu Tokunaga
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520976932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Focusing on Los Angeles farmland during the years between the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Japanese Internment in 1942, Transborder Los Angeles weaves together the narratives of Mexican and Japanese immigrants into a single transpacific history. In this book, Yu Tokunaga moves from international relations between Japan, Mexico, and the US to the Southern California farmland, where ethnic Japanese and Mexicans played a significant role in developing local agriculture, one of the major industries of LA County before World War II. Japanese, Mexicans, and white Americans developed a unique triracial hierarchy in farmland that generated both conflict and interethnic accommodation by bringing together local issues and international concerns beyond the Pacific Ocean and the US-Mexico border. Viewing these experiences in a single narrative form, Tokunaga breaks new ground, demonstrating the close relationships between the ban on Japanese immigration, Mexican farmworkers' strikes, wartime Japanese removal, and the Bracero Program.

Hazardous Metropolis

Hazardous Metropolis PDF Author: Jared Orsi
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520238508
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
An fascinating history of flood control efforts in Los Angeles from the 1870s to the present, showing how engineering has continually failed to contain nature. This book teaches us to think of cities as ecosystems.

Metropolis in the Making

Metropolis in the Making PDF Author: Tom Sitton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520935527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Los Angeles came of age in the 1920s. The great boom of that decade gave shape to the L.A. of today: its vast suburban sprawl and reliance on the automobile, its prominence as a financial and industrial center, and the rise of Hollywood as the film capital of the world. This collection of original essays explores the making of the Los Angeles metropolis during this remarkable decade. The authors examine the city's racial, political, cultural, and industrial dynamics, making this volume an essential guide to understanding the rise of Los Angeles as one of the most important cities in the world. These essays showcase the work of a new generation of scholars who are turning their attention to the history of the City of Angels to create a richer, more detailed picture of our urban past. The essays provide a fascinating look at life in the new suburbs, in the oil fields, in the movie studios, at church, and at the polling place as they reconceptualize the origins of contemporary urban problems and promise in Los Angeles and beyond. Adding to its interest, the volume is illustrated with period photography, much of which has not been published before.

Ground Control

Ground Control PDF Author: Jeffrey S. Nesbit
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040096034
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex explores the infrastructural history of the United States rocket launch complex. Working primarily between 1950, the year of the first rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, to 1969, the Apollo moon landing, the book highlights the evolution of its overlooked architecture and infrastructural landscape in parallel to US aerospace history. The cases outlined in this book survey the varying architectural histories and aesthetic motivations that helped produce America’s public image of early space exploration. The built environment of the U.S. space complex shows how its expanded infrastructural landscape tended to align with national Cold War politics and themes found in the age of modernity. Examples across often inaccessible sites of remote landscape help explain the contingent histories and deep association of an American aesthetic, land-use, and ultimately a form of nation-building practices. Ground Control offers a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science were designed and constructed in support of both industrial and military activities in postwar America. This book will be of interest to researchers, scholars, students, and anyone with a general interest in the history of American infrastructure, land use, and space exploration.

The Other California

The Other California PDF Author: Verónica Castillo-Muñoz
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291638
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 186

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Book Description
Introduction: the Mexican borderlands -- Building the Mexican borderlands -- The making of Baja California's multicultural society -- Revolution, labor unions, and early movements for land reform in Baja California 1910-1930 -- "Land and liberty": conflict, land reform, and repatriation in the Mexicali Valley, 1930-1940 -- Mexicali's exceptionalism -- Conclusion: the "all Mexican" train

Heavy Ground

Heavy Ground PDF Author: Norris Hundley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520287665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Minutes beforeÊmidnightÊon March 12, 1928, the St. Francis Dam collapsed, sending more than 12 billion gallons of water surging through CaliforniaÕs Santa Clara Valley and killing some 400 people, causing the greatest civil engineering disaster in twentieth-century American history. This extensively illustrated volume gives an account of how the St. Francis Dam came to be built, the reasons for its collapse, the terror and heartbreak brought by the flood, the efforts to restore the Santa Clara Valley, the political factors influencing investigations of the failure, and the effect of the disaster on dam safety regulation. Underlying all is a consideration of how the damÑand the disasterÑwere inextricably intertwined with the life and career of William Mulholland.Ê