Industrial History

During the afternoon of March 25, 1911, shortly before workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in the Asch Building left for the day, a fire broke out in a scrap bin on the eighth floor of the building. The spread of the fire to the main staircase made it impossible for workers still stuck on the ninth and 10th floors to escape. Without today's labor regulations in place, an advanced warning of the fire never even made it to the ninth floor, despite the fire starting just one floor below, and the door to the only other stairway had been locked.

Seven million people worldwide suffer from Parkinson's, and doctors, researchers, and patients continue to hunt for a cure. In Brain Storms, the award-winning journalist Jon Palfreman tells their story, a story that became his own when he was diagnosed with the debilitating illness.

Few diseases are more gruesome than typhus. Transmitted by body lice, it afflicts the dispossessed - refugees, soldiers, and ghettoized peoples - causing hallucinations, terrible headaches, boiling fever, and often death. The disease plagued the German army on the Eastern Front and left the Reich desperate for a vaccine. For this they turned to the brilliant and eccentric Polish zoologist Rudolf Weigl.

How the Military-Industrial Complex Shapes Technological Progress By Kevin L. Michel A groundbreaking exploration of how war, security, and innovation have shaped the modern world—and the urgent question of whether we can redirect technological progress toward a more just and sustainable future. For centuries, military research and innovation have fueled some of humanity’s most transformative technologies. From gunpowder and nuclear energy to the internet, GPS, and artificial intelligence, many of today’s most powerful tools were first developed under the banner of national security. ...

MODERN WARFARE: History’s Most Devastating Cyberattacks dives deep into the hidden battleground of the 21st century—where masked hackers, rogue states, and shadowy cyber units wage war on critical infrastructure, government networks, and private enterprises. From the Stuxnet worm that crippled Iran’s nuclear program to the NotPetya blitz that shattered global supply chains, this riveting chronicle unveils the anatomy of each attack and the real-world consequences of digital combat. Explore Pivotal Incidents: In-depth analysis of landmark events—Stuxnet, Sony Pictures breach, ...

The kidney is an extraordinary organ—in many ways the regulator, the metronome, the keeper of the human body’s delicate equilibrium. On a given day, minute by minute, it purifies the body of toxins it encounters from diet, climate, activity, and injury. It allows us to be and to move in the world. And yet most of us know so very little about these extraordinary vessels nestled in our bodies—and indeed millions of us only really learn about them when they stop working. Nearly a million Americans every year have end stage kidney disease, about 37 million have some form of chronic kidney disease.

Dr. Sartor wrote an inspiring first-person account of how he treated more than 1,000 patients—and by his reckoning, lost only five—which lay forgotten in a lockbox of family artifacts until it was discovered decades later by his granddaughter, Beth Obermeyer, a journalist and author of three previous books. Beth knew her grandfather through her teenage years and grew up absorbing family stories. Based upon Dr. Sartor’s memoir and her years of research, she vividly reconstructs his life from childhood in Luxembourg to medical school in Chicago, courtship and marriage.

Feeling feverish, tired, or achy? Listening to Gina Kolata's engrossing account of the 1918 Influenza epidemic is sure to give you the chills. A gripping work of science writing, Flu addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and considers what can be done to prevent it.

Between 1848 and 1899, more gold was removed from the earth than had been mined in the 3,000 preceding years, bringing untold wealth to individuals and nations. But friction between Chinese and white settlers on the goldfields of California, Australia, and South Africa catalyzed a global battle over "the Chinese Question": Would the United States and the British Empire outlaw Chinese immigration?

Ever since we started huddling together in communities, the story of human history has been inextricably entwined with the story of microbes. They have evolved and spread amongst us, shaping our culture through infection, disease, and pandemic. At the same time, our changing human culture has itself influenced the evolutionary path of microbes. Dorothy H. Crawford here shows that one cannot be truly understood without the other. Beginning with a dramatic account of the SARS pandemic at the start of the 21st century, she takes us back in time to follow the interlinked history of microbes and man....

Nearly two decades after it closed, the South Carolina State Hospital continues to hold a palpable mystique in Columbia and throughout the state. Founded in 1821 as the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, it housed, fed, and treated thousands of patients incapable of surviving on their own. The patient population in 1961 eclipsed 6,600, well above its listed capacity of 4,823. By the mid-1990s, the patient population had fallen under 700, and the hospital had become a symbol of captivity, horror, and chaos.

Dr. Aribert Heim worked at the Mauthausen concentration camp for only a few months in 1941 but left a devastating mark. According to the testimony of survivors, Heim euthanized patients with injections of gasoline into their hearts. He performed surgeries on otherwise healthy people. Some recalled prisoners' skulls set out on his desk to display perfect sets of teeth. Yet in the chaos of the postwar period, Heim was able to slip away from his dark past and establish himself as a reputable doctor and family man in the resort town of Baden-Baden.

Adéntrese en la fascinante historia de la medicina con este audiolibro repleto de sorprendentes anécdotas y los pasajes de la historia más determinantes e interesantes sobre epidemias, guerras, medicamentos, grandes hazañas o las fatídicas infecciones. Una obra donde se abordan desde los mayores logros médicos de la humanidad y las enfermedades más cruentas y devastadoras que asolaron ciudades y países, hasta las anécdotas y casos más curiosos que provocaron el mayor de los asombros.

以《红楼梦》作者曹氏家族祖孙四代人的经历为纬，以这一家族之效劳与卖命的江宁织造为经，展现曹氏一家由盛而衰、由受宠爱到被凌辱的命运……以《紅樓夢》作者曹氏家族祖孫四代人的經歷為緯，以這一家族之效勞與賣命的江寧織造為經，展現曹氏一家由盛而衰、由受寵愛到被凌辱的命運……

This classic book is the whole unruly story of dance music in one volume. It recreates the dance floors that made history, conjuring their atmosphere with loving detail and bringing you the voices of the DJs and clubbers at their heart—from grime, garage, house, hip hop and disco, to techno, soul, reggae, rock 'n' roll and EDM. Whether musical outlaw, obsessive crate-digger or overpaid superstar, the DJ has been at the spinning centre of nightlife for a century, making parties wilder, pushing clubbers harder and driving music into completely new shapes and styles.

Heroines of Mercy Street tells the true stories of the nurses at Mansion House, the Alexandria, Virginia, mansion turned wartime hospital and setting for the new PBS drama Mercy Street. Among the Union soldiers, doctors, wounded men from both sides, freed slaves, politicians, speculators, and spies who passed through the hospital in the crossroads of the Civil War were nurses who gave their time freely and willingly to save lives and aid the wounded.

In Arsenal of Democracy: The American Automobile Industry in World War II, award-winning historian Charles K. Hyde details the industry's transition to a wartime production powerhouse and some of its notable achievements along the way. Hyde examines several innovative cooperative relationships that developed between the executive branch of the federal government, US military services, automobile industry leaders, auto industry suppliers, and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, which set up the industry to achieve production miracles.

Author Jeremy Rifkin presents an insider's account of the next great economic era: the Third Industrial Revolution, when a new ethic of sustainability will revolutionize the world we live in.

In May 1970, four days after Kent State, construction workers chased students through downtown Manhattan, beating scores of protesters bloody. As hardhats clashed with hippies, it soon became clear that something larger was underway - Democrats were at war with themselves. In The Hardhat Riot, David Paul Kuhn tells the fateful story of when the white working class first turned against liberalism, when Richard Nixon seized the breach, and America was forever changed.

From the beginning of the eighteenth century to the high water mark of the Victorian era, the world was transformed by a technological revolution the like of which had never been seen before. Inventors, businessmen, scientists, explorers all had their part to play in the story of the Industrial Revolution and in this Brief History Thomas Crump brings their story to life, and shows why it is a chapter in English history that can not be ignored.