Flying Across America

Flying Across America PDF Author: Daniel L. Rust
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description
Americans who now endure the inconveniences of crowded airports, packed airplanes, and missed connections might not realize that flying was once an elegant, exhilarating adventure. In this colorful history, Daniel L. Rust traces the evolution of commercial air travel from the first transcontinental expeditions of the 1920s, through the luxurious airline environments of the 1960s, to the more hectic, fatiguing experiences of flying in the post-9/11 era. In the beginning, flying coast-to-coast was an exciting yet uncomfortable journey of nearly forty-eight hours that required numerous stops and overnight travel by train. With time and technical innovation, passengers became increasingly removed both physically and psychologically from the raw experience of flying. Faster planes, pressurized cabins, onboard amenities, and stronger safety precautions made flying more convenient and predictable—but also less evocative and sensational. Prior to the 1980s, Americans dressed for air travel in their formal best and enjoyed such luxurious onboard amenities as delicious meals and ample cabin space. What made air travel glamorous, however, also made it more expensive. With deregulation in 1978, cost reductions reduced flying to a more tedious and, after 9/11, more regimented experience. Rust’s narrative brims with firsthand accounts from such celebrities as Will Rogers and from ordinary Americans. Enlivened by more than 100 illustrations, including vintage brochures, posters, and photographs, Flying Across America reminds today’s airline passengers of what they have gained—and what they have lost—in the transcontinental flying experience.

Flying Across America

Flying Across America PDF Author: Daniel L. Rust
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Americans who now endure the inconveniences of crowded airports, packed airplanes, and missed connections might not realize that flying was once an elegant, exhilarating adventure. In this colorful history, Daniel L. Rust traces the evolution of commercial air travel from the first transcontinental expeditions of the 1920s, through the luxurious airline environments of the 1960s, to the more hectic, fatiguing experiences of flying in the post-9/11 era. In the beginning, flying coast-to-coast was an exciting yet uncomfortable journey of nearly forty-eight hours that required numerous stops and overnight travel by train. With time and technical innovation, passengers became increasingly removed both physically and psychologically from the raw experience of flying. Faster planes, pressurized cabins, onboard amenities, and stronger safety precautions made flying more convenient and predictable—but also less evocative and sensational. Prior to the 1980s, Americans dressed for air travel in their formal best and enjoyed such luxurious onboard amenities as delicious meals and ample cabin space. What made air travel glamorous, however, also made it more expensive. With deregulation in 1978, cost reductions reduced flying to a more tedious and, after 9/11, more regimented experience. Rust’s narrative brims with firsthand accounts from such celebrities as Will Rogers and from ordinary Americans. Enlivened by more than 100 illustrations, including vintage brochures, posters, and photographs, Flying Across America reminds today’s airline passengers of what they have gained—and what they have lost—in the transcontinental flying experience.

The Forum

The Forum PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 798

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Book Description
Current political, social, scientific, education, and literary news written about by many famous authors and reform movements.

Femininity in Flight

Femininity in Flight PDF Author: Kathleen Barry
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389509
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
“In her new chic outfit, she looks like anything but a stewardess working. But work she does. Hard, too. And you hardly know it.” So read the text of a 1969 newspaper advertisement for Delta Airlines featuring a picture of a brightly smiling blond stewardess striding confidently down the aisle of an airplane cabin to deliver a meal. From the moment the first stewardesses took flight in 1930, flight attendants became glamorous icons of femininity. For decades, airlines hired only young, attractive, unmarried white women. They marketed passenger service aloft as an essentially feminine exercise in exuding charm, looking fabulous, and providing comfort. The actual work that flight attendants did—ensuring passenger safety, assuaging fears, serving food and drinks, all while conforming to airlines’ strict rules about appearance—was supposed to appear effortless; the better that stewardesses performed by airline standards, the more hidden were their skills and labor. Yet today flight attendants are acknowledged safety experts; they have their own unions. Gone are the no-marriage rules, the mandates to retire by thirty-two. In Femininity in Flight, Kathleen M. Barry tells the history of flight attendants, tracing the evolution of their glamorized image as ideal women and their activism as trade unionists and feminists. Barry argues that largely because their glamour obscured their labor, flight attendants unionized in the late 1940s and 1950s to demand recognition and respect as workers and self-styled professionals. In the 1960s and 1970s, flight attendants were one of the first groups to take advantage of new laws prohibiting sex discrimination. Their challenges to airlines’ restrictive employment policies and exploitive marketing practices (involving skimpy uniforms and provocative slogans such as “fly me”) made them high-profile critics of the cultural mystification and economic devaluing of “women’s work.” Barry combines attention to the political economy and technology of the airline industry with perceptive readings of popular culture, newspapers, industry publications, and first-person accounts. In so doing, she provides a potent mix of social and cultural history and a major contribution to the history of women’s work and working women’s activism.

Forum

Forum PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 832

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Book Description


Empire of the Air

Empire of the Air PDF Author: Jenifer Van Vleck
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674727320
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
From the flights of the Wright brothers through the mass journeys of the jet age, airplanes inspired Americans to reimagine their nation’s place within the world. Now, Jenifer Van Vleck reveals the central role commercial aviation played in the United States’ rise to global preeminence in the twentieth century. As U.S. military and economic influence grew, the federal government partnered with the aviation industry to carry and deliver American power across the globe and to sell the very idea of the “American Century” to the public at home and abroad. Invented on American soil and widely viewed as a symbol of national greatness, the airplane promised to extend the frontiers of the United States “to infinity,” as Pan American World Airways president Juan Trippe said. As it accelerated the global circulation of U.S. capital, consumer goods, technologies, weapons, popular culture, and expertise, few places remained distant from the influence of Wall Street and Washington. Aviation promised to secure a new type of empire—an empire of the air instead of the land, which emphasized access to markets rather than the conquest of territory and made the entire world America’s sphere of influence. By the late 1960s, however, foreign airlines and governments were challenging America’s control of global airways, and the domestic aviation industry hit turbulent times. Just as the history of commercial aviation helps to explain the ascendance of American power, its subsequent challenges reflect the limits and contradictions of the American Century.

Hard Landing

Hard Landing PDF Author: Thomas Petzinger, Jr.
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 030777449X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 629

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Book Description
In this updated paperback edition of a "rich, readable, and authoritative" Fortune) book, Wall Street Journal reporter Petzinger tells the dramatic story of how a dozen men, including Robert Crandall of American Airlines, Frank Borman of Eastern, and Richard Ferris of United, battled for control of the world's airlines.

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature

Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Periodicals
Languages : en
Pages : 898

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Book Description


Air University Review

Air University Review PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Aeronautics
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description


Making Animals Public

Making Animals Public PDF Author:
Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743329709
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
Making Animals Public: television, animality and political engagement focuses on the proliferation of animal content on television and how this has transformed how animals are known and encountered, generating unique modes of televisual animality. The book examines the multiplicity of public realities and knowledges that animals on TV have constituted: from scientific objectivity, to the unique Australian environment, to controversial victims of gross exploitation. Just as television has made animals public in very particular ways, it has also made new publics that have learnt to be affected by them. Thanks to extraordinary access to the ABC’s Natural History and general archives, the authors are able to investigate the dynamic relation between making animals public and making publics over time.

Imagining Flight

Imagining Flight PDF Author: A. Bowdoin Van Riper
Publisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585443000
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Imagining Flight is a history of the air age as the rest of us have experienced it: on the pages of books, the screens of movie theaters, and the front pages of newspapers. It focuses on the United States, but also contrasts American ideas and attitudes with those of other air-minded nations, including Britain, France, Germany and Japan.