Author: Fulgence MarionPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
Wonderful balloon ascents; or, The conquest of the skies. From the Fr
WONDERFUL BALLONN ASCENTS: OR, The Conquest of the Skies. A HISTORY OF BALLONS VOYAGES.
Author: Flying Across America
Author: Daniel L. RustPublisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806186321
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270
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.
Femininity in Flight
Author: Kathleen BarryPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822389509
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 324
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.
Sky As Frontier
Author: David T. CourtwrightPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585444199
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Book Description
A look at how aviation's frontier lasted only a scant 3 decades, then vanished as commercial and military imperatives made flying routine.
The Forum
Author: Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 798
Book Description
Current political, social, scientific, education, and literary news written about by many famous authors and reform movements.
Forum
Author: Imagining Flight
Author: A. Bowdoin Van RiperPublisher: Texas A&M University Press
ISBN: 9781585443000
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 236
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.
Making Animals Public
Author: Publisher: Sydney University Press
ISBN: 1743329709
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 205
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.
Fallen Soldiers
Author: George L. MossePublisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199923442
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
Book Description
At the outbreak of the First World War, an entire generation of young men charged into battle for what they believed was a glorious cause. Over the next four years, that cause claimed the lives of some 13 million soldiers--more than twice the number killed in all the major wars from 1790 to 1914. But despite this devastating toll, the memory of the war was not, predominantly, of the grim reality of its trench warfare and battlefield carnage. What was most remembered by the war's participants was its sacredness and the martyrdom of those who had died for the greater glory of the fatherland. War, and the sanctification of it, is the subject of this pioneering work by well-known European historian George L. Mosse. Fallen Soldiers offers a profound analysis of what he calls the Myth of the War Experience--a vision of war that masks its horror, consecrates its memory, and ultimately justifies its purpose. Beginning with the Napoleonic wars, Mosse traces the origins of this myth and its symbols, and examines the role of war volunteers in creating and perpetuating it. But it was not until World War I, when Europeans confronted mass death on an unprecedented scale, that the myth gained its widest currency. Indeed, as Mosse makes clear, the need to find a higher meaning in the war became a national obsession. Focusing on Germany, with examples from England, France, and Italy, Mosse demonstrates how these nations--through memorials, monuments, and military cemeteries honoring the dead as martyrs--glorified the war and fostered a popular acceptance of it. He shows how the war was further promoted through a process of trivialization in which war toys and souvenirs, as well as postcards like those picturing the Easter Bunny on the Western Front, softened the war's image in the public mind. The Great War ended in 1918, but the Myth of the War Experience continued, achieving its most ruthless political effect in Germany in the interwar years. There the glorified notion of war played into the militant politics of the Nazi party, fueling the belligerent nationalism that led to World War II. But that cataclysm would ultimately shatter the myth, and in exploring the postwar years, Mosse reveals the extent to which the view of death in war, and war in general, was finally changed. In so doing, he completes what is likely to become one of the classic studies of modern war and the complex, often disturbing nature of human perception and memory.