Charged with the ever-present potential for danger and occasionally punctuated by terrible moments of disaster, the history of space exploration has been keenly dramatic. The recent disaster of the Space Shuttle Columbia was a sad but certain reminder that space travel is an extraordinarily dangerous occupation. Oddly enough, it often takes a tragic accident to remind us that we still have a presence in space.

In the decades between triumph and tragedy we tend to ignore the fact that there have been scores of space pioneers who have risked their lives to explore our solar system. Indeed, the International Space Station is sometimes referred to as "Alpha," a moniker that implies that it is our first real permanent presence in space. But this notion is frowned upon by the Russians – and for good reason. Prior to the construction of the controversial International Space Station, a host of daring Russian cosmonauts, and a smaller number of intrepid American astronauts, were living in space for months, some of them for over a year.

In this definitive account of man’s quest to become citizens of the cosmos, noted space historian Robert Zimmerman reveals the great global gamesmanship between Russian and American political leaders that drove us to the stars. Beaten to the Moon by their Cold War enemies, the Russians were intent on being first to the planets. They believed that manned space stations held the greatest promise for reaching other worlds and worked feverishly to build a viable space station program – one that would dwarf American efforts and allow the Russians to claim the vast territories of space as their own.

Although unthinkable at the time, the ponderously bureaucratic Soviet Union actually managed to overtake the United States in the space station race. Leveraging their propaganda machine and tyrannical politics to launch a series of daring, dangerous, and scientifically brilliant space exploits, their efforts not only put them far ahead of NASA, they also helped to reshape their own society, transforming it from dictatorship to democracy. At the same time, the American space program at NASA was also evolving, but not necessarily for the better. In fact, the two programs were slowly but inexorably trading places.

Drawing on his vast store of knowledge about space travel, as well as hundreds of interviews with cosmonauts, astronauts, and scientists, Zimmerman has superbly captured the excitement and suspense of our recent space-traveling past. For space and history enthusiasts alike, Leaving Earth describes a rich heritage of adventure, exploration, research, and discovery.

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5,6 MB
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Robert Zimmerman - Leaving Earth, Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetar y Travel (2003).pdf

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Anonymus - Imperial Hubris, Why the west is loosin g the war on terror (2004).jpg

Hawks will squirm as the author heaps contempt on U.S. missions in Afghanistan (too little, too late) and Iraq ("a sham causing more instability than it prevents"), but opponents of Bush administration policies may blanch at Anonymous' suggestion that what's needed is for the West to "proceed with relentless, brutal, and, yes, blood-soaked offensive military actions until we have annihilated the Islamists who threaten us." Quoting the at-all-cost likes of William Tecumseh Sherman and Curtis Lemay on one hand and contending that unrelenting military measures be accompanied by concessions to the ideology of the militants on the other are unlikely to curry widespread support from either side of the divide. And how will readers conditioned to references to Osama bin Laden as a deranged gangster or simple-minded fanatic with deep pockets digest the respect accorded "the most popular anti-American leader in the world today"? Imperial Hubris clearly wasn't written to win friends, though the author believes it's essential that his words influence people at the top. Whether it will is debatable, but that this blunt, forceful, urgently argued polemic recharges the discussion is a foregone conclusion.

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1,4 MB
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Anonymus - Imperial Hubris, Why the west is loosin g the war on terror (2004).pdf

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United States Presidents - Paul Joseph - Herbert H oover (2001).jpg

A biography of Herbert Hoover, thirty-first president of the United States, describing his career as mining engineer, millionaire businessman, stateman, humanitarian relief worker, and president during the Great Depression.

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2,1 MB
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United States Presidents - Paul Joseph - Herbert H oover (2001).pdf

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United States Presidents - Anne Welsbacher - Theod ore Roosevelt (1998).jpg

A biography of the man who became the twenty-sixth president of the United States when President McKinley was shot in 1901 and who helped establish the national park system.

A biography of the the man who became the twenty-sixth president of the United States when President McKinley was shot in 1901 and who helped establish the national park system.

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1,5 MB
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United States Presidents - Anne Welsbacher - Theod ore Roosevelt (1998).pdf

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Jeffrey Berman - Death in the Classroom, Writing A bout Love and Loss (2009).jpg

In Death in the Classroom, Jeffrey Berman writes about Love and Loss, the course that he designed and taught two years after his wife's death, in which he explored with his students the literature of bereavement. Berman, building on his previous courses that emphasized self-disclosing writing, shows how his students wrote about their own experiences with love and loss, how their writing affected classmates and teacher alike, and how writing about death can lead to educational and psychological breakthroughs. In an age in which eighty percent of Americans die not in their homes but in institutions, and in which, consequently, the living are separated from the dying, Death in the Classroom reveals how reading, writing, and speaking about death can play a vital role in a student's education.

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Jeffrey Berman - Death in the Classroom, Writing A bout Love and Loss (2009).pdf

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Steven J. Brady - Eisenhower and Adenauer, Allianc e Maintenance under Pressure, 1953-1960 (2009).jpg

In the early years of the Atlantic Alliance, no bilateral relationship was more important than that between the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States. Even so, the West German-American alliance was taxing for both sides during much of the first two decades of the Cold War. Ultimately, despite frequent, significant challenges to the alliance from without and within, the two allies managed to achieve a positive and productive relationship - Eisenhower and Adenauer explains how they did so. In both capitals, the top foreign policy makers were deeply involved in the conduct of what they viewed as a vital bilateral alliance, with both President Dwight Eisenhower and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer taking the lead in his own government. For the Americans, a rearmed FRG tightly bound to the West was the bedrock of any European security policy that could contain the Soviet Union for the long-term. For the West German government, their relationship with the United States was the bedrock of rehabilitation and, indeed, survival as an independent country. In this book, their alliance is closely analyzed to form new knowledge on the West German-American relationship during the Cold War.

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2,3 MB
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Steven J. Brady - Eisenhower and Adenauer, Allianc e Maintenance under Pressure, 1953-1960 (2009).pdf

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Bland Simpson, Scott D. Taylor - The Coasts of Car olina, Seaside to Sound Country (2010).jpg

The Coasts of Carolina captures the vibrancy of the North Carolina oceanfront, sound country, and interior shores behind the barrier islands. Scott Taylor, who has been photographing the coast for almost thirty years, and Bland Simpson, whose many coastal books have delighted readers for two decades, come together to offer an inviting visual and textual portrait organized around coastal themes such as nature, fishing, and community life, with an emphasis on particular places and seasons. Evocative text is woven together with 145 vivid color images to present a unique and welcoming vision of the coastal region. As natives of the area, the collaborators venture beyond the familiar to show us swamp, marsh, river, sound, and seashore, uncovering places of uncommon delight that most visitors rarely lay eyes on. Their work celebrates the beauty of this amazing region and embodies their distinctive sense of what makes the North Carolina coast so special.

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26,8 MB
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Bland Simpson, Scott D. Taylor - The Coasts of Car olina, Seaside to Sound Country (2010).pdf

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William Logan - The Undiscovered Country (2005).jpg

William Logan has been called both the "preeminent poet-critic of his generation" and the "most hated man in American poetry." For more than a quarter century, in the keen-witted and bare-knuckled reviews that have graced the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement (London), and other journals, William Logan has delivered razor-sharp assessments of poets present and past. Logan, whom James Wolcott of Vanity Fair has praised as being "the best poetry critic in America," vividly assays the most memorable and most damning features of a poet's work. While his occasionally harsh judgments have raised some eyebrows and caused their share of controversy (a number of poets have offered to do him bodily harm), his readings offer the fresh and provocative perspectives of a passionate and uncompromising critic, unafraid to separate the tin from the gold.

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Daniel Paisner - Last Man Down (2003).jpg

When the north tower of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, Picciotto, an FDNY battalion commander, was inside it, on a stairwell between the sixth and seventh floors, along with a handful of rescue personnel and one "civilian." This outspoken account tells of that indelible day, and it will shake and inspire readers to the core. The book starts by listing the 343 firefighters who died from the attacks, setting an appropriately grave tone to what follows, which begins as the author heads to work at Engine Co. 76 and Ladder Co. 22 on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Then comes a call on the intercom, and soon he is racing down to the World Trade Center. Arriving, he dodges falling bodies, runs inside and upstairs with a battalion not his own.

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Daniel Paisner - Last Man Down (2003).pdf

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Nan Johnson - Gender and Rhetorical Space in Ameri can Life, 1866-1910 (2002).jpg

Nan Johnson demonstrates that after the Civil War, nonacademic or “parlor” traditions of rhetorical performance helped to sustain the icon of the white middle class woman as queen of her domestic sphere by promoting a code of rhetorical behavior for women that required the performance of conventional femininity. Through a lucid examination of the boundaries of that gendered rhetorical space—and the debate about who should occupy that space—Johnson explores the codes governing and challenging the American woman’s proper rhetorical sphere in the postbellum years.

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Nan Johnson - Gender and Rhetorical Space in Ameri can Life, 1866-1910 (2002).pdf

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Jeremy Waldron - Law and Disagreement (1999).jpg

Author Jeremy Waldron has thoroughly revised thirteen of his most recent essays in order to offer a comprehensive critique of the idea of the judicial review of legislation. He argues that a belief in rights is not the same as a commitment to a Bill of Rights. This book presents legislation by a representative assembly as a form of law making which is especially apt for a society whose members disagree with one another about fundamental issues of principle.

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Caroline A. Williams - Bridging the Early Modern A tlantic World (2009).jpeg

"Bridging the Early Modern Atlantic World" brings together ten original essays by an international group of scholars exploring the complex outcomes of the intermingling of people, circulation of goods, exchange of information, and exposure to new ideas that are the hallmark of the early modern Atlantic. Spanning the period from the earliest French crossings to Newfoundland at the beginning of the sixteenth century to the end of the wars of independence in Spanish South America, c. 1830, and encompassing a range of disciplinary approaches, the contributors direct particular attention to regions, communities, and groups whose activities in, and responses to, an ever-more closely bound Atlantic world remain relatively under-represented in the literature. Some of the chapters focus on the experience of Europeans, including French consumers of Newfoundland cod, English merchants forming families in Spanish Seville, and Jewish refugees from Dutch Brazil making the Caribbean island of Nevis their home.

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Michael J. Klarman - From Jim Crow to Civil Rights , The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Eq uality (2004).jpg

USA Books1 - Michael J. Klarman - From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, T...preme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality 2004.jpg

"Michael J. Klarman's monumental book--undertaking a sweeping exploration of the causes and consequences of all of the Supreme Court's race decisions from Plessy v. Ferguson to Brown vs. Board of Education--is likely to become the definitive study of the Supreme Court and race in the first half of the twentieth century. As a narrative history of the Court's actions on the broad array of constitutional issues relevant to racial equality--from criminal procedure to voting rights to desegregation--the book is an invaluable resource."--Reviews in American History

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Michael J. Klarman - From Jim Crow to Civil Rights , The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Eq uality (2004).pdf

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Jennifer Ritterhouse - Growing Up Jim Crow, The Ra cial Socialization of Black and White Southern Chi ldren, 1890-1940 (2006).jpg

USA Books1 - Jennifer Ritterhouse - Growing Up Jim Crow, The Racia... of Black and White Southern Children, 1890-1940 2006.jpg

In the segregated South of the early twentieth century, unwritten rules guided every aspect of individual behavior, from how blacks and whites stood, sat, ate, drank, walked, and talked to whether they made eye contact with one another. Jennifer Ritterhouse asks how children learned this racial "etiquette," which was sustained by coercion and the threat of violence. More broadly, she asks how individuals developed racial self-consciousness.

Parental instruction was an important factor--both white parents' reinforcement of a white supremacist worldview and black parents' oppositional lessons in respectability and race pride. Children also learned much from their interactions across race lines. The fact that black youths were often eager to stand up for themselves, despite the risks, suggests that the emotional underpinnings of the civil rights movement were in place long before the historical moment when change became possible. Meanwhile, a younger generation of whites continued to enforce traditional patterns of domination and deference in private, while also creating an increasingly elaborate system of segregation in public settings. Exploring relationships between public and private and between segregation, racial etiquette, and racial violence, Growing Up Jim Crow sheds new light on tradition and change in the South and the meanings of segregation within southern culture.

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Jennifer Ritterhouse - Growing Up Jim Crow, The Ra cial Socialization of Black and White Southern Chi ldren, 1890-1940 (2006).pdf

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Michelle R. Boyd - Jim Crow Nostalgia, Reconstruct ing Race in Bronzeville (2008).jpg

In the Jim Crow era of the early twentieth century, Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood on the city’s South Side was a major center of African American cultural vitality and a destination for thousands of Southern blacks seeking new opportunities in the North during the Great Migration. After decades of decline, the 1980s saw several community organizations in the neighborhood collaborating on a revitalization plan called “Restoring Bronzeville,” envisioning an idealized version of the neighborhood as it had thrived during segregation. Opening with a description by a Bronzeville tour guide, wistful for the days of its famously rich and rewarding cultural life, Michelle R. Boyd examines how black leaders reinvented the neighborhood’s history in ways that, amazingly, sanitized the brutal elements of life under Jim Crow. Connecting such collective inventions of memory to neighborhood projects in the present, Boyd emphasizes how interpretations of history are mobilized for political goals and how links between nostalgia and redevelopment contribute to the politicization of racial identity. As community leaders sought to make an area more attractive to investors, she finds that they consciously worked to define and even redraw geographic boundaries, real estate values, and even the character of the people who lived there.

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Michelle R. Boyd - Jim Crow Nostalgia, Reconstruct ing Race in Bronzeville (2008).pdf

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Peter Schmidt - Sitting in Darkness. New South Fic tion, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonial ism, 1865-1920 (2008).jpg

USA Books1 - Peter Schmidt - Sitting in Darkness. New South Fictio... and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920 2008.jpg

Sitting in Darkness explores how fiction of the Reconstruction and the New South intervenes in debates over black schools, citizen-building, Jim Crow discrimination, and U.S. foreign policy towards its territories and dependencies. The author urges a reexamination not only of the contents and formal innovations of New South literature but also its importance in U.S. literary history. Many rarely discussed fiction authors (such as Ellwood Griest, Ellen Ingraham, George Marion McClellan, and Walter Hines Page) receive generous attention here, and well-known figures such as Albion Tourgee, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, George Washington Cable, Mark Twain, Thomas Dixon, Owen Wister, and W. E. B. Du Bois are illuminated in significant new ways. The book's readings seek to synthesize older and recent developments in literary and cultural studies ranging through new criticism, new historicism, postcolonial studies, black studies, and "whiteness" studies. This volume posits and answers significant questions. In what ways did the "uplift" projects of Reconstruction--their ideals and their contradictions--affect U.S. colonial policies in the new territories after 1898? How can fiction that treated these historical changes help us understand them? What relevance does this period have for us in the present, during a moment of great literary innovation and strong debate over how well the most powerful country in the world uses its resources?

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Peter Schmidt - Sitting in Darkness. New South Fic tion, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonial ism, 1865-1920 (2008).pdf

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Thad, Sitton, Richard Orton - Freedom Colonies, In dependent Black Texans in the Time of Jim Crow (20 05).jpeg

In the decades following the Civil War, nearly a quarter of African Americans achieved a remarkable victory—they got their own land. While other ex-slaves and many poor whites became trapped in the exploitative sharecropping system, these independence-seeking individuals settled on pockets of unclaimed land that had been deemed too poor for farming and turned them into successful family farms. In these self-sufficient rural communities, often known as "freedom colonies," African Americans created a refuge from the discrimination and violence that routinely limited the opportunities of blacks in the Jim Crow South.

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