Touching History

Author: Lynn Spencer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 141657946X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

Book Description
On the azure blue morning of 9/11 the skies were pronounced "severe clear," in the parlance of airline pilots; a gorgeous day for flying. Nearly 5,000 flights were cruising the skies over America when FAA Operations Manager Ben Sliney arrived at the Command Center for his first day on that job. He could never have anticipated the historic drama that was about to unfold as Americans who found themselves on the front lines of a totally unprecedented attack on our homeland sprang into action to defend our country and save lives. In this gripping moment-to-moment narrative, based on groundbreaking reporting, Lynn Spencer brings the inspiring true drama of their unflinching and heroic response vividly to life for the first time, taking us right inside the airliner cockpits and control towers, the fighter jets and the military battle cabs. She makes vital corrections to the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report, and reveals many startling, utterly unknown elements of the story. As a commercial pilot herself, for whom the attacks hit terribly close to home, she knew that the true scope and nature of the response so brilliantly improvised that morning by those in the thick of the action -- with so little guidance from those at the highest levels -- had not at all been captured by the news coverage or the 9/11 Commission. To get to the truth, she went on a three-year quest, interviewing hundreds of key players, listening to untold hours of tapes and pouring through voluminous transcripts to re-create each heart-stopping moment as it happened through their eyes and in their words as the drama unfolded. From the shocking moment at 7:59 a.m. that American 11 fails to respond to a controller's call, until the last commercial flight has safely landed and military jets rule the skies, all Americans will find themselves deeply moved and amazed by the grace and fierce determination of these steely men and women as they draw on all of their exquisite training to grasp, through the fog of war, what is happening, put their lives on the line, and mount an astonishing response. This beautifully crafted and deeply affecting account of the full story of their courageous actions is a vital addition to the country's understanding of a day that has forever changed our nation.

Touching Space

Author: Gregory P. Kennedy
Publisher: Schiffer Military History Book
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 140

Book Description
Project Manhigh took humans to the threshold of space using balloons. In the 1950s, a small band of Air Force doctors were on the cutting edge of the United States' space research programs. Working at the Aeromedical Field Laboratory at Holloman Air Force Base in southern New Mexico, they used balloons to carry laboratory animals followed by human pilots above 99% of the atmosphere. Drawing upon flight reports and technical data, this book documents Project Manhigh and the high altitude flights that preceded it. The Manhigh flights were, in many ways, prototypes for future space missions. On each of the three flights, the Air Force placed a lone pilot in a sealed capsule nineteen miles above the ground. At such extreme altitudes, the pilots were well within the functional equivalent of outer space and needed the sealed capsule to survive. Manhigh existed prior to the creation of NASA and helped pave the way for human space exploration.

Touching Base

Author: Steven A. Riess
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252067754
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332

Book Description
Discusses the ideology of baseball, professional baseball and urban politics, politics, ballparks, and the neighborhoods, social reform, and baseball as a source of social mobility.

Sensing the Past

Author: Mark Michael Smith
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520254954
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 198

Book Description
"Smith's history of the sensate is destined to precipitate a revolution in our understanding of the sensibilities that underpinned the mentalities of past epochs."--David Howes, author of Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory "Mark M. Smith presents a far-ranging essay on the history of the senses that serves simultaneously as a good introduction to the historiography. If one feels in danger of sensory overload from this growing body of scholarship, Smith's piece is a useful preventive."--Leigh E. Schmidt, author of Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality "This is a masterful overview. The history of the senses has been a frontier field for a while now. Mark Smith draws together what we know, with an impressive sensory range, and encourages further work. A really exciting survey."--Peter N. Stearns, author of American Fear: The Causes and Consequences of High Anxiety "Who would ever have guessed that a book on the history of the senses--seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling--could be informative, thought-provoking, and, at the same time, most entertaining? Ranging in both time and locale, Mark Smith's Sensing the Past makes even the philosophy about the senses from ancient times to now both learned and exciting. This work will draw scholars into under-recognized subjects and lay readers into a world we simply but unwisely take for granted."--Bertram Wyatt-Brown, author of Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South "Mark M. Smith has a good record of communicating his research to a broad constituency within and beyond the academy . . . This will be required reading for anyone addressing sensory history."--Penelope Gouk, author of Music, Science and Natural Magic in Seventeenth Century England "This is a fine cultural history of the body, which takes Western and Eastern traditions and their texts quite seriously. Smith views a history of the senses not only from 'below' but places it squarely in the historical imagination. It will be of interest to a wide range of readers."--Sander L. Gilman, author of Difference and Pathology

Touching History

Author: Sholom Gold
Publisher: Gefen Books
ISBN: 9789652296399
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
This gripping memoir tells the personal story of a man who has lived at the epicenter of the major events of modern Jewish history. From the ashes of Auschwitz to statehood and theingathering of the exiles, Rabbi Sholom Gold has lived through the most traumatic, tragic, and majestic period in the four-thousand-year saga of thr Jewish people.

Touching the Sky (Land of the Lone Star Book #2)

Author: Tracie Peterson
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 144127099X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
Romantic Adventure from Tracie Peterson! When Laura Marquardt first meets Brandon Reid, their encounter is anything but pleasant. But when the two are seated together at a dinner party, they soon find that they share similar interests--Laura desires to educate blacks, and Brandon, as a white officer over colored troops, eagerly supports her cause. When Laura's sister, Carissa, marries her Confederate beau, Laura finds herself in a difficult situation when she overhears plots to kill Union soldiers. Though in her heart she feels she should share this information with Brandon, Laura fears she will betray her sister's trust and possibly endanger her sister's life. And when Brandon's motives for pursuing her come into question, her heart is even more conflicted. Where is God leading her?

Global Gold Production Touching Ground

Author: Boris Verbrugge
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030384861
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
In recent decades, gold mining has moved into increasingly remote corners of the globe. Aside from the expansion of industrial gold mining, many countries have simultaneously witnessed an expansion of labor-intensive and predominantly informal artisanal and small-scale gold mining. Both trends are usually studied in isolation, which contributes to a dominant image of a dual gold mining economy. Counteracting this dominant view, this volume adopts a global perspective, and demonstrates that both industrial gold mining and artisanal and small-scale gold mining are functionally integrated into a global gold production system. It couples an analysis of structural trends in global gold production (expansion, informalization, and technological innovation) to twelve country case studies that detail how global gold production becomes embedded in institutional and ecological structures.

Touching the Ancient One

Author: Rupert Pratt
Publisher: Rupert Pratt
ISBN: 1587365812
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 394

Book Description
On February 5, 1954, an Air Force C-47 broke apart over the Susitna Valley of South Central Alaska and fell onto Kesugi Ridge. Six miraculously escaped, survived bone-chilling cold, and were rescued through the efforts of pilots Cliff Hudson and Don Sheldon. Unacquainted with one another before the accident, the Air Force men bonded in the hospital. Forty-two years later, the survivors and their families, the families of the victims, and rescuers came together for a reunion in Dayton, Ohio. It was a meeting that would change their lives. This is a true story, told by one of the survivors. Rupert Pratt's book celebrates life and friendship--themes set appropriately against the backdrop of Kesugi, "The Ancient One."

Touching Photographs

Author: Margaret Olin
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226626466
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Photography does more than simply represent the world. It acts in the world, connecting people to form relationships and shaping relationships to create communities. In this beautiful book, Margaret Olin explores photography’s ability to “touch” us through a series of essays that shed new light on photography’s role in the world. Olin investigates the publication of photographs in mass media and literature, the hanging of exhibitions, the posting of photocopied photographs of lost loved ones in public spaces, and the intense photographic activity of tourists at their destinations. She moves from intimate relationships between viewers and photographs to interactions around larger communities, analyzing how photography affects the way people handle cataclysmic events like 9/11. Along the way, she shows us James VanDerZee’s Harlem funeral portraits, dusts off Roland Barthes’s family album, takes us into Walker Evans and James Agee’s photo-text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and logs onto online photo albums. With over one hundred illustrations, Touching Photographs is an insightful contribution to the theory of photography, visual studies, and art history.

Touching Ground

Author: Tim Testu
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1614293449
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 215

Book Description
The vivid story of a hippie, a carpenter, a Vietnam vet, an alcoholic, a marine engineer, and a great dad who battled his demons on the Buddhist path. From October 16, 1973, to August 17, 1974, Tim Testu walked all the way from San Francisco to Seattle, bowing his head to the ground every three steps. And that’s not even the best part of his story. Tim Testu was one of the very first Americans to take ordination in Chinese Zen Buddhism. His path—from getting kicked out of school to joyriding in stolen boats in the Navy to squatting in an anarchist commune to wholehearted spiritual engagment in a strict Buddhist monastery—is equal parts rollicking adventure and profound spiritual memoir. Touching Ground is simultaneously larger than life and entirely relatable; even as Tim finds his spiritual home with his teacher, the legendary Chan master Hsuan Hua, he nonetheless continues to struggle to overcome his addictions and his very human shortcomings. Tim never did anything halfway, including both drinking and striving for liberation. He died of leukemia in 1998 after packing ten lifetimes into fifty-two years.