[PDF] Inventing Modern America eBook

Author : David E. Brown
Publisher : Mit Press
Page : 221 pages
File Size : 34,61 MB
Release : 2003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780262523493

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Profiles thirty-five inventors whose various innovations changed life in modern America.

Author : John H. Lienhard
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 312 pages
File Size : 36,94 MB
Release : 2003-09-18
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780198036364

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Modern is a word much used, but hard to pin down. In Inventing Modern, John H. Lienhard uses that word to capture the furious rush of newness in the first half of 20th-century America. An unexpected world emerges from under the more familiar Modern. Beyond the airplanes, radios, art deco, skyscrapers, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Buck Rogers, the culture of the open road--Burma Shave, Kerouac, and White Castles--lie driving forces that set this account of Modern apart. One force, says Lienhard, was a new concept of boyhood--the risk-taking, hands-on savage inventor. Driven by an admiration of recklessness, America developed its technological empire with stunning speed. Bringing the airplane to fruition in so short a time, for example, were people such as Katherine Stinson, Lincoln Beachey, Amelia Earhart, and Charles Lindbergh. The rediscovery of mystery powerfully drove Modern as well. X-Rays, quantum mechanics, and relativity theory had followed electricity and radium. Here we read how, with reality seemingly altered, hope seemed limitless. Lienhard blends these forces with his childhood in the brave new world. The result is perceptive, engaging, and filled with surprise. Whether he talks about Alexander Calder (an engineer whose sculptures were exercises in materials science) or that wacky paean to flight, Flying Down to Rio, unexpected detail emerges from every tile of this large mosaic. Inventing Modern is a personal book that displays, rather than defines, an age that ended before most of us were born. It is an engineer's homage to a time before the bomb and our terrible loss of confidence--a time that might yet rise again out of its own postmodern ashes.

Author : Isabel Heinemann
Publisher : Campus Verlag
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 15,62 MB
Release : 2012-05
Category : History
ISBN : 3593396408

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Family is the foundation of society, and debates on family norms have always touched the very heart of America. This volume investigates the negotiations and transformations of family values and gender norms in the twentieth century as they relate to the overarching processes of social change of that period. By combining long-term approaches with innovative analysis, Inventing the "Modern American Family" transcends not only the classical dichotomies between women's studies and masculinity studies, but also contribute substantially to the history of gender and culture in the United States.

Author : Garry Wills
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Page : 436 pages
File Size : 30,29 MB
Release : 2002
Category : History
ISBN : 9780618257768

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From one of America's foremost historians, Inventing America compares Thomas Jefferson's original draft of the Declaration of Independence with the final, accepted version, thereby challenging many long-cherished assumptions about both the man and the document. Although Jefferson has long been idealized as a champion of individual rights, Wills argues that in fact his vision was one in which interdependence, not self-interest, lay at the foundation of society. "No one has offered so drastic a revision or so close or convincing an analysis as Wills has . . . The results are little short of astonishing" (Edmund S. Morgan New York Review of Books ).

Author : Pauline Maier
Publisher : W. W. Norton
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 36,89 MB
Release : 2006-04-04
Category : United States
ISBN : 9780393168150

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Adopted at over 250 colleges and universities in its First Edition, Inventing America broke new ground by integrating the cultural, social, and political dimensions of the American story around the unifying theme of innovation the pragmatic forward-looking direction of American history, the willingness of Americans to find new solutions in the face of challenge and change.

Author : Isabel Heinemann
Publisher : Campus Verlag
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 27,51 MB
Release : 2012-05
Category : History
ISBN : 3593396408

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Family is the foundation of society, and debates on family norms have always touched the very heart of America. This volume investigates the negotiations and transformations of family values and gender norms in the twentieth century as they relate to the overarching processes of social change of that period. By combining long-term approaches with innovative analysis, Inventing the "Modern American Family" transcends not only the classical dichotomies between women's studies and masculinity studies, but also contribute substantially to the history of gender and culture in the United States.