For most of the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, railroads dominated American transportation. They transformed life and captured the imagination. Yet by 1907 railroads had also become the largest cause of violent death in the country, that year claiming the lives of nearly twelve thousand passengers, workers, and others. In Death Rode the Rails Mark Aldrich explores the evolution of railroad safety in the United States by examining a variety of incidents: spectacular train wre...

A history of the dynamic role of coal in the energy landscape of the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.In The Rise and Fall of King Coal, Mark Aldrich explores the pivotal role of coal in the historical energy landscape of the United States. Meticulously researched and clearly written, this analysis of the rise, dominance, and eventual decline of coal as a primary fuel source traces its evolution from the late eighteenth century t...

A fascinating account of one of America’s most important industries and its dangers.Throughout the early twentieth century, railroad safety steadily improved across the United States. But by the 1960s, American railroads had fallen apart, the result of a regulatory straightjacket that eroded profitability and undermined safety. Collisions, derailments, worker fatalities, and grade crossing mishaps skyrocketed, while hazmat disasters exploded into newspaper headline...

Founded by Reuben H. Fleet in 1923, Consolidated Aircraft Corporation (later Convair) became one of the most significant aircraft manufacturers in American history. For roughly 60 years, this prolific company was synonymous with San Diego. In fact, whole sections of the city were designed to provide homes for the Convair workers and their families. These men and women were responsible for building some of the most significant aircraft in aviation history, including the PBY Catalina, B-24 L...

San Diego�s North Island is one of the most significant venues of aviation in the world. Starting in 1911, it was the home to one of the nation�s first aviation schools, founded by Glenn Curtiss, who pioneered seaplane flight. He trained the nucleus of America�s future air forces there, including Lt. Theodore Ellyson, the first naval aviator. When the United States entered World War I, the government took over the island with plans to build a training center for the nation�s armed forces. ...

2020 Audie Awards® Finalist - Audio Drama2019SOVAS Voice Arts Award—Best Voiceover in Children's Audiobook2019 SOVAS Voice Arts Award—Outstanding Production in AudiobookPuss in Boots, a fractured fairytale musical, is a tale of conquering fears, finding your truth, discovering your strengths, and standing for what you believe in, with lots of fun along the way.

Identifying “lessons learned” is not new—the military has been doing it for decades. However, members of the worldwide intelligence community have been slow to extract wider lessons gathered from the past and apply them to contemporary challenges. Learning from the Secret Past is a collection of ten carefully selected cases from post-World War II British intelligence history. Some of the cases include the Malayan Emergency, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Northern Ireland, and the lead ...

Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities.How did the United States become the world's largest consumer of energy? David Nye shows that this is less a question about the development of technology than it is a question about the development of culture. In Consuming Power, Nye uses energy as a touchstone to examine the lives of ordinary people engaged in normal activities. He looks at how these activ...

"Easily the most thorough and best-grounded account of the coal-based system of heating in the nineteenth-century United States . . . authoritative." — The New England QuarterlyHome Fires tells the fascinating story of how changes in home heating over the nineteenth century spurred the growth of networks that helped remake American society. Sean Patrick Adams reconstructs the ways in which the "industrial hearth" appeared in American cities, the me...

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A gripping, groundbreaking biography of the combative man whose genius and force of will created modern capitalism.In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other in...

New from Broadside Books' Voices of the Tea Party. I, Light Bulb: A Death Row Testimonial as told to Michael Patrick Leahy, demonstrates how the American economy has gone from free markets to politically correct, government controlled crony capitalism in the half century since Leonard E. Read wrote the classic essay I, Pencil. Leahy tells the story of the ban on the current generation of incandescents from the perspective of a condemned 100 watt light bulb. In the voice of the light bulb, ...

"Makes a reader feel like a time traveler plopped down among men who were by turns vicious and visionary."—The Christian Science MonitorThe modern American economy was the creation of four men: Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan. They were the giants of the Gilded Age, a moment of riotous growth that established America as the richest, most inventive, and most productive country on the planet.A...