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

The global coffee industry, which fuels the livelihoods of farmers, entrepreneurs, and consumers around the world, rests on fragile ecological foundations. In Coffee Is Not Forever, Stuart McCook explores the transnational story of this essential crop through a history of one of its most devastating diseases, the coffee leaf rust. In the process, he illuminates the progress and prognosis of the challenges - especially climate change - that pose an existential threat to a crop that global consumers often take for granted.

Empire of Water explores the history of New York City’s water system - from the late 19th century to the early 21st century - focusing on the geographical, environmental, and political repercussions of the city’s search for more water. By tracing the evolution of the city’s water conservation efforts and watershed management regime, Soll reveals the tremendous shifts in environmental practices and consciousness that occurred during the 20th century.

This work takes listeners to two countries ravaged by World War II, Poland and Japan, recounting the wartime experiences of teenagers Bogdan and Seiko. Bogdan’s family abandoned its home in Bydgoszcz, Poland, and fled to Warsaw, where Bogdan fought for the Polish Home Army in the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. During this brutal conflict, as Poles tried to oust occupying Germans, Bogdan sustained severe injuries, and after the Germans crushed the Uprising, he endured seven POW camps. On the other side of the globe, in Hokkaido, Japan, Seiko’s country went to war against the U.S.

In the most comprehensive biography on the subject yet, Gus Grissom: The Lost Astronaut offers a more personal side and fuller picture of Grissom’s life and character. Author Ray E. Boomhower explores Grissom’s life from his days as a child to his service as a combat pilot. He delves into the process by which NASA selected its original seven Mercury astronauts, the jostling for position to be the first American in space, and Grissom’s near-fatal Liberty Bell 7 flight that haunted his subsequent space career.

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.

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?

By tracing the history of Winthrop’s speech, its changing status through time, and its use in modern politics, Van Engen asks us to reevaluate our national narratives. He tells the story of curators, librarians, collectors, archivists, antiquarians, and other often anonymous figures who emphasized the role of the Pilgrims and Puritans in American history, paving the way for the saving and sanctifying of a single sermon and its eventual transformation into an American tale.

The Road to Concord: How Four Stolen Cannon Ignited the Revolutionary War by historian J. L. Bell reveals a new dimension to the start of America’s War for Independence by tracing the spark of its first battle back to little-known events beginning in September 1774. The author relates how radical Patriots secured those four cannon and smuggled them out of Boston, and how Gage sent out spies and search parties to track them down.

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.

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.

Drawing on declassified documents, interviews with intelligence veterans and policymakers, and other sources, The Image of the Enemy examines how seven countries analyzed and used intelligence to understand their main adversary. The cases in the book include the Soviet Union's analysis of the United States (and vice versa), East Germany's analysis of West Germany (and vice versa), British intelligence in the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Israeli intelligence about the Palestinians, and more.

In US Foreign Policy and Defense Strategy, the authors analyze the strategic underpinnings of hegemony, assess the national security establishment that sustains dominance, consider the impact on civil-military relations, and explore the intertwining relationships between foreign policy, defense strategy, and commercial activities.

If not for an unlikely alliance among a bespectacled cowboy, a former Confederate general, and a millionaire newspaper publisher, the Spanish-American War might never have been. How these three outsize characters—Theodore Roosevelt, Joseph “Fighting Joe” Wheeler, and William Randolph Hearst—helped ignite the war that established the United States’ offshore empire is the rousing tale that Matthew Bernstein tells in Team of Giants.

Political turmoil surrounding immigration at the federal level and the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform have provided an opening for state and local governments to become more active in setting their own immigration-related policies. States largely dictate the resources, institutions, and opportunities immigrants can access: who can get a driver’s license or attend a state university, what languages are spoken in schools and public offices, how law enforcement interacts with the public, and even what schools teach students about history.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

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.