A deeply humane and religious scientist, Morgan regards his own role, in meeting the challenges presented by the "angry genie" of nuclear energy, with the same unblinking eye he focuses on government, the military, and the nuclear industry. He tells harrowing tales of radiation accidents and near-disasters, and shows the actual and potential consequences of the clumsiness, recklessness, and carelessness of fallible human beings.
Born in 1848, Andrew Benoni Hammond built an empire of wood that stretched from Puget Sound to Arizona—and in the process had reshaped the American West and the nation’s way of doing business. When Money Grew on Trees follows Hammond from the rough-and-tumble world of mid-nineteenth-century New Brunswick to frontier Montana and the forests of Northern California—from lowly lumberjack to unrivaled timber baron.
The Wilderness Act and the Fight to Protect Miners Ridge and the Public Interest
by Adam M. Sowards
An Open Pit Visible from the Moon tells the story of this historic struggle to define the contours of the Wilderness Act—its possibilities and limits. Combining rigorous analysis and deft storytelling, Adam M. Sowards re-creates the contest between Kennecott and its shareholders on one hand and activists on the other, intent on maintaining wilderness as a place immune to the calculus of profit.
American and British Cavalry Responses to a New Technology, 1903–1939
by Lori A. Henning
Harnessing the Airplane compares how the American and British armies dealt with this unique challenge. A multilayered look at a critical aspect of modern industrial warfare, this book examines the ramifications of technological innovation and its role in the fraught relationship that developed between traditional ground units and emerging air forces.
California’s Kern River, the Environment, and the Making of Western Water Law
by Douglas R. Littlefield
Far from a dry legal history, Ruling the Waters tells a story with world-wide historical environmental ramifications, a tale of competing personalities and values and visions that forever changed both the economy and the ecology of the American West.
The contribution to the mining history of the United States by emigrant Cornish miners—the men called Cousin Jacks
by Arthur Cecil Todd
The hands of Cornish miners bore scars of one of the most sophisticated traditions of hard-rock mining in the world.Toughened “Cousin Jacks” brought generations of toilsome underground experience...
Hydraulic mining was, and remains, controversial.It produced great wealth from the soil of California, yet damaged the land in such a way that the scars will remain for eons. Great hillsides...
During the oil-boom days of the early twentieth century, a few lucky or shrewd individuals made millions of dollars virtually overnight. It is a familiar theme in the romantic mythology that sprang up about the era. But the people who produced those millions are the real story, told in these word-for-word recollections of early-day workers in the “oil patch.” In vivid, often poignant detail these men and women recall the grueling toil, primitive living and working conditions, and ever-present danger in a time when life was cheap and oil was gold.
For many outsiders, the word “ranching” conjures romantic images of riding on horseback through rolling grasslands while living and working against a backdrop of breathtaking mountain vistas. In this absorbing memoir of life in the Wyoming high country, Mary Budd Flitner offers a more authentic glimpse into the daily realities of ranch life—and what it takes to survive in the ranching world.
John J. Montgomery and the Dawn of Aviation in the West
by Craig S. Harwood and Gary B. Fogel
The Wright brothers have long received the lion’s share of credit for inventing the airplane. But a California scientist succeeded in flying gliders twenty years before the Wright’s powered flights at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Quest for Flight reveals the amazing accomplishments of John J. Montgomery, a prolific inventor who piloted the glider he designed in 1883 in the first controlled flights of a heavier-than-air craft in the Western Hemisphere.
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