Showing results by narrator "DOUGLAS R PRATT" in All Categories

Colonel Pat Proctor’s long overdue critique of the army’s preparation and outlook in the all-volunteer era focuses on a national security issue that continues to vex in the 21st century: Has the army lost its ability to win strategically by focusing on fighting conventional battles against peer enemies? Or can it adapt to deal with the greater complexity of counterinsurgent and information-age warfare?

This audiobook traces the evolution of the Browning Automatic Rifle from the Model of 1918, first to face combat in World War I, through its various configurations in all arenas of combat all the way to the present-day1918 A3 SLR developed and manufactured by Ohio Ordnance Works. Used sparingly during World War I because of the United States’ late entry into the war, it played a major role during World War II and the Korean Conflict, offering a very reliable combination of rapid fire and penetration.

Tom Rivers, a reporter for The Daily News in Batavia, wrote a first-person series about farm work in 2008 that won state and national awards. Now the series, with more background and other information, has been compiled in a newly released audiobook, Farm Hands: Hard Work and Hard Lessons from Western New York Fields. Rivers worked at a dozen farms in Orleans and Genesee counties, trying to find out why so few local residents are willing to work on farms. He discovered the work requires many skills, enormous willpower and physical strength.

Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man strikes a balance between prevailing notions about this quintessential Western figure. Whereas the dime novelists exploited Carson's popular reputation, Remley reveals that the real man was dependable, ethical, and - for his day - relatively open-minded. Remley sees Carson as a complicated man struggling to master life on America's borders, where people of different races, cultures, and languages met, mixed, and fought, sometimes against each other, sometimes together, for the possession of home, hunting rights, and honor.

In Eisenhower's Sputnik Moment, Yanek Mieczkowski examines the early history of America's space program, reassessing Eisenhower's leadership. He details how Eisenhower approved breakthrough satellites, supported a new civilian space agency, signed a landmark science education law, and fostered improved relations with scientists. Offering a fast-paced account of this Cold War episode, Mieczkowski demonstrates that Eisenhower built an impressive record in space and on earth.

The career of John Charles Frémont (1813-90) ties together the full breadth of American expansionism from its 18th-century origins through its culmination in the Gilded Age. Tom Chaffin's biography demonstrates Frémont's vital importance to the history of American empire and illuminates his role in shattering long-held myths about the ecology and habitability of the American West.

Mountains, Carl von Clausewitz said, introduce a “retarding element” into warfare. To fight in mountains, armies must overcome this challenge via survival strategies and mobility. But the techniques and technologies for doing so are best found in civilian skiing and mountaineering communities, a situation almost unique to mountain warfare. Ski, Climb, Fight looks at how the 10th Mountain Division of World War II met this challenge and how the U.S. military does so today. The first military history of that storied division, the book is also the first general history of U.S. mountain warfare.

Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, the Metropolitan Museum of Art began an ambitious program of collection building and physical expansion that transformed it into one of the world’s foremost museums, an eminence that it has maintained ever since. Two men of singular qualities and accomplishments played key roles in the Met’s transformation—J. P. Morgan, America’s leading financier and a prominent art collector, and Roger Fry, the headstrong English expert in art history who served as the Met’s curator of painting.

Crucible of the Incurable concerns how people face life with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Anthony Stavrianakis spent a year in clinics and with people living with the illness in the United States. He examines the multiple meanings of care in a context of a chronic, degenerative, one-hundred percent fatal, neuromuscular illness, whose most common duration is between two and five years. How do people diagnosed with ALS continue to "live as well as possible, for as long as possible" in accordance with the normative work at the heart of outpatient ALS care?

In March 1983, as the world’s superpowers continued aggressively stockpiling nuclear weapons, President Ronald Reagan described his vision for a world no longer confronted with the concept of mutually assured destruction. A year later the Strategic Defense Initiative was established, followed soon after by the creation of the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO).

In Smitten, Rodney Hessinger examines how the Second Great Awakening disrupted gender norms across a breadth of denominations. The displacement and internal migration of Americans created ripe conditions for religious competition in the North. Hessinger argues that during this time of religious ferment, religious seekers could, in turn, play the missionary or the convert. The dynamic of religious rivalry inexorably led toward sexual and gender disruption.

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in the earth’s crust. It is also ubiquitous in the modern world, from aircraft to soda cans. A dizzying number of consumer and industrial products employ aluminum, typically alloyed, because of its availability, versatility, and malleability. Today, how efficiently we use—and reuse—aluminum is vital to addressing key environmental challenges and understanding humanity’s fraught relationship with the earth.

Charney’s stories and lessons will provide anyone with the necessary investigative skills to look at a landscape, interpret it, and tell its story—from its start as rock or soil to the plants and animals that live on it. Ultimately, Charney argues, by critically engaging with the landscape we will become better at connecting with nature and ourselves.

The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras in this book, reveals the critical fault in the nation’s foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once.

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies.

John B. Denton was an orphan in frontier Arkansas who became a circuit-riding Methodist preacher and an important member of a movement of early settlers bringing civilization to North Texas. He was a participant in the first missionary effort to bring Methodism to Texas, answering a call from William B. Travis to bring Methodists to the new republic

Before the widespread popularity of automobiles, buses, and trucks, freight and passenger trains bound the nation together. The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience explores the role of local frontline workers that kept the country's vast rail network running.

A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)—Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great “American” victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted by Francis Parkman and other early historians.

In the years following the Revolutionary War, the young American nation was in a state of chaos. Citizens pleaded with government leaders to reorganize local infrastructures and heighten regulations, but economic turmoil, Native American warfare, and political unrest persisted. By 1784, one group of North Carolina frontiersmen could no longer stand the unresponsiveness of state leaders to their growing demands. This ambitious coalition of Tennessee Valley citizens declared their region independent from North Carolina, forming the state of Franklin.

At the center of American history is a hole—a gap where some scholars’ indifference or disdain has too long stood in for the true story of the American Midwest. A first-ever chronicle of the Midwest’s formative century, The Good Country restores this American heartland to its central place in the nation’s history.