Books

How Everyday Citizens Played an Integral Role in the Development of NASA’s Space Shuttle

Captures the Drama and Complexity of Past Transitions While Looking toward Energy Sources of the Future

The Complete Story of the Worst Air Pollution Disaster in US History

American Mosaic presents the recollections of 140 immigrants from six continents and fifty countries who have settled all across the United States.

Written almost half a century ago, this book offers an invaluable history of the conservation movement’s origins, and provides an excellent context for understanding contemporary enviromental problems and possible solutions. This book defines two conflicting political processes: the demand for an integrated, controlled development guided by an elite group of scientists and technicians and the demand for a looser system allowing grassroots impulses to have a voice through elected representatives.

In this brilliantly edited collection of personal interviews, Maida Springer, one of the twentieth-century’s most fascinating international labor leaders and powerful African-American women, tells her story in her own words.

Centered around mostly ordinary people, Harry, Tom, and Father Rice relates the story of the author’s uncle Harry Davenport, union leader Tom Quinn, and Father Charles Owen Rice to the great conflict between anti-Communist and Communist forces in the American labor movement.

Big Steel is the first comprehensive history of the company at the center of America’s twentieth-century industrial life—the United States Steel Corporation. Granted unprecedented access to the U.S. Steel archives, Warren tells the compelling history of this business.

A history of the role of American society in shaping the policies of the United States Forest Service.

An original examination of legislative clashes over the singular issue of the glass house boys, who performed menial tasks, received low wages, and had little to say on their own behalf while toiling in glass bottle plants. Flannery reveals the many societal, economic, and political factors at work that allowed for the perpetuation of child labor in this industry and region.

Bethlehem Steel presents an original and compelling history of a leading American company, examining the numerous factors contributing to the growth of this titan and those that eventually felled it—along with many of its competitors in the U.S. steel industry.

Race and Renaissance presents the first history of African American life in Pittsburgh after World War II. It examines the origins and significance of the second Great Migration, the persistence of Jim Crow into the postwar years, the second ghetto, the contemporary urban crisis, the civil rights and Black Power movements, and the Million Man and Million Woman marches, among other topics.

Sanders examines the rise of environmental activism in Seattle amidst the “urban crisis” of the 1960s and its aftermath. Seattle’s activists came to influence everything from industry to politics, planning, and global environmental movements.

The weekly magazine Garden and Forest existed for only nine years (1888-1897). Yet, in that brief span, it brought to light many of the issues that would influence the future of American environmentalism. In The City Natural, Shen Hou presents the first “biography” of this important but largely overlooked vehicle for individuals with the common goal of preserving nature in American civilization. As Hou reveals, Garden and Forest was instrumental in redefining the fields of botany and horticulture, while also helping to shape the fledgling professions of landscape architecture and forestry.

Pastoral and Monumental chronicles America’s longtime fascination with dams as represented on picture postcards from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Through over four hundred images, Donald C. Jackson documents the remarkable transformation of dams and their significance to the environment and culture of America.