Water transportation has played a key role in the Great Lakes region’s settlement and economic growth, from providing entry into the new lake states to offering cheap transportation for the goods they produced. There are numerous tales surrounding the Great Lakes shipping trade, but few storytellers have addressed the factors that influenced the use, design, and evolution of the ships that sailed the inland seas. Sail, Steam, and Diesel: Moving Cargo on the Great Lakes provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of Great Lakes ships over the centuries, from small birch-bark canoes originally used in the region to the massive thousand-footers of today. The author also looks at the economics of vessel operation in the context of the expanding scope of the shipping industry, which was crucial in catapulting America into becoming an industrial juggernaut. The captains of industry and the sailors whose labor propelled the trade populate this account, which also offers solemn acknowledgment of the high cost paid in both lost ships and lives. Although they might not realize it, millions of Americans have owed their livelihoods to the Great Lakes boats, and this volume is an excellent way to recognize the importance of this regional industry.

Ordered by the Royal Navy in 1941, the destroyers of the 5th Emergency Flotilla became known as S-class and served as fleet and convoy escorts in World War II. In the last months of the war, three were transferred to the Royal Netherlands Navy for service in the Far East. HMS Serapis was renamed HNLMS Piet Hein and served in the Indonesian War of Independence and saw action in the Korean War. She was sold for scrap in 1962.

Examines how the Kennedy administration and the media constructed the space program in ways designed to win congressional and public approval

Examines the Kennedy administration’s rhetorical campaign to persuade Congress and the public to adopt a manned flight to the moon. In so doing, the study addresses three key themes.

First, it illuminates the contrasting nature of technical and narrative arguments and explores how those arguments play different roles in public discussion of social policy. Second, the book examines how both the executive branch and the news media function to help set the agenda in American politics. Offering a case study of the increasingly complex relationship between the government and the media.

Finally, Selling Outer Space explores the power of technology to shape and direct human action.
 

Shared vehicles are a key part of any future intelligent and clean transport system, as they can allow for the sharing and potentially more efficient use of transport resources and fuel. Shared mobility has been gaining attention in the private and public sectors as a possible strategy for taming auto ownership, vehicle miles/kilometers travelled, and emissions.

From the day that French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle launched the Griffin in 1679 to the 1975 sinking of the celebrated Edmund Fitzgerald, thousands of commercial ships have sailed on the vast and perilous waters of the Great Lakes. In a harbinger of things to come, on the return leg of its first trip in late summer 1679, the Griffin disappeared and has never been seen again. In the centuries since then, the records show that an alarming number of shipwrecks have occurred on the Great Lakes. If vessels that wrecked but were later repaired and returned to service are included, the number certainly swells into the thousands. Most did not mysteriously vanish like the Griffin. Instead, they suffered the occupational hazards of every lake boat: collisions, groundings, strands, fires, boiler explosions, and capsizes. Many of these disasters took the lives of crews and passengers. The fearsome wrath of the storms that brew over the Great Lakes has challenged and defeated some of the staunchest vessels constructed in the shipyards of port cities along the U.S. and Canadian lakeshores. Here Richard Gebhart tells the tales of some of these ships and their captains and crews, from their launches to their sad demises—or sometimes, their celebrated retirements. This volume is a must-read for anyone intrigued by the maritime history of the Great Lakes.

The control of the longitudinal, lateral and vertical dynamics of two and four-wheeled vehicles, both of conventional type as well as fully-electric, is important not only for general safety of vehicular traffic in general, but also for future automated driving.

Smart roads are road infrastructures with integrated structural materials, sensors, information centres, and energy systems. They are intended to extend the road's service life and performance, reduce safety risks, and improve service quality. Several smart road pilot projects have been initiated, such as precast pavements with integrated optical fibres, self-healing asphalt material, self-snow-melting systems and solar pavements.

Growth in urbanisation, particularly in emerging economies, is causing increased traffic congestion and affecting environmental conditions in cities. Cities need to manage this growth in traffic in an efficient way. Intelligent infrastructure for traffic monitoring and sensing offers a potential solution, and so this book explores the prospective role of this approach in managing congestion, the established and emerging related technologies, and routes to effective implementation.

The Sopwith Triplane was a British single seat fighter aircraft designed and manufactured by the Sopwith Aviation Company during the First World War. It has the distinction of being the first military triplane to see operational service.

The ss 'Australis' was a well known ocean liner which entered service in 1940 as the
ss 'America' for the United States Lines. The ship was sold to the Greek Chandris Lines in 1964 and served until 1977 very succesfully on the route Western-Europe-Australia-New Zealand. Later the route became a full round-the-world-service. After her Australian period the liner sailed under the names of 'America' (for the third time), 'Italis', 'Noga', 'Alferdoss' and finally 'American Star'. In this volume of Liners the history of the great liner from when she was purchased by the Greek interest in 1964 until her sad wracking in January 1994.

Based on the author’s extensive research into the early history of Wisconsin’s rails, Steam and Cinders chronicles the boom and bust of the first railroads in the state, from the charters of the 1830s to the farm mortgages of the 1850s and consolidation of the railroads on the eve of the Civil War. Featuring more than 75 period photographs, historic maps, and drawings, Steam and Cinders preserves the legacy of early Wisconsin railroading for railroad buffs and armchair historians alike.

Anyone interested in the rise of American corporate capitalism should look to the streets of Baltimore. There, in 1827, citizens launched a bold new venture: a “rail-road” that would link their city with the fertile Ohio River Valley. They dubbed this company the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (B&O), and they conceived of it as a public undertaking—an urban improvement, albeit one that would stretch hundreds of miles beyond the city limits.

Steam City tells the story of corporate capitalism starting from the street and moving outward, looking at how the rise of the railroad altered the fabric of everyday life in the United States. The B&O’s founders believed that their new line would remap American economic geography, but no one imagined that the railroad would also dramatically reshape the spaces of its terminal city. As railroad executives wrangled with city officials over their use of urban space, they formulated new ideas about the boundaries between public good and private profit. Ultimately, they reinvented the B&O as a private enterprise, unmoored to its home city. This bold reconception had implications not only for the people of Baltimore, but for the railroad industry as a whole. As David Schley shows here, privatizing the B&O helped set the stage for the rise of the corporation as a major force in the post-Civil War economy.

​Steam City examines how the birth and spread of the American railroad—which brought rapid communications, fossil fuels, and new modes of corporate organization to the city—changed how people worked, where they lived, even how they crossed the street. As Schley makes clear, we still live with the consequences of this spatial and economic order today.
 

Through a skillful combination of economic and cultural history, this book describes the impact on Moldavia and Wallachia of steam navigation on the Danube. The Danube route integrated the two principalities into a dense network of European roads and waterways. From the 1830s to the 1860s, steamboat transport transformed time and space for the areas that benefited from regular services. River traffic accelerated urban development along the Lower Danube and contributed directly to institutional modernization in one of Europe’s peripheries.

Beyond technological advances and the transportation of goods on a trans-imperial waterway, steamboat travel revolutionized human interactions, too. The book offers a fascinating insight into the social and cultural milieu of the nineteenth century, drawing on first-hand accounts of Danube cruising. Describing the story of travelers who interacted, met, and visited the places they stopped, Constantin Ardeleanu creates a transnational history of travel up and down the Danube from Vienna to Constantinople. The pleasures and sometimes the travails of the travelers unfold against a backdrop of technical and economic transformation in the crucial period of modernization.

A soaring adventure, a riveting biography, and a reclamation of a great American story lost to history.

In Stone Age Astronaut, award-winning author Liam Callanan uncovers the astonishing life of Lester Maitland—the Milwaukee-born aviator who, in 1927, became the first person to fly to Hawaii, earning national acclaim on par with Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic triumph. For a brief moment, the two men shared headlines, White House invitations, and fame. But while Lindbergh’s legacy grew, Maitland’s all but vanished.

Callanan brings Maitland back into the spotlight, tracing his meteoric early career: flight instructor at nineteen; one of the US Army’s first test pilots; the first American to fly faster than 200 mph; and the pioneering airman whose Pacific crossing earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross.

Just twenty-two days after becoming Executive Officer of the Far East Air Service Command—and one day after Pearl Harbor—Maitland witnessed the destruction of much of the Far East Air Force in the Philippines. Later, he commanded the 386th Bomb Group in Europe, making him World War II’s oldest bomber pilot, only to be abruptly and mysteriously retired weeks before D-Day. After the war, Maitland experienced a series of professional and personal disappointments, and he quietly faded into obscurity. He eventually became an Episcopal priest, serving small parishes far from the glamour of his early days in the cockpit.

The pages of Stone Age Astronaut hum with the tension and excitement of early aviation, rendered in a richly detailed narrative and Callanan’s research—spanning archives, newspapers, interviews, and travel to key sites—to reveal the remarkable sweep of Lester Maitland’s world. Along the way, readers encounter a constellation of notable figures: Amelia Earhart, Billy Mitchell, Ernest Hemingway, Gerald Ford, Richard Bong, the Dole Pineapple King, Harry Houdini, and even a Skull and Bones–affiliated aviation official.

With sparkling prose and a storyteller’s instinct for detail, Callanan resurrects a man whose life intersected with major events, eras, and personalities—but who has inexplicably slipped through the cracks of American memory.

A gripping portrait of ambition, innovation, fame, failure, and reinvention—and the enduring human urge to fly—Stone Age Astronaut ensures that Lester Maitland’s extraordinary story will no longer be forgotten. 

Faced with intolerable congestion and noxious pollution, cities around the world are rethinking their reliance on automobiles. In the United States a loosely organized livability movement seeks to reduce car use by reconfiguring urban space into denser, transit-oriented, walkable forms, a development pattern also associated with smart growth and new urbanism. Through a detailed case study of San Francisco, Jason Henderson examines how this is not just a struggle over what type of transportation is best for the city, but a series of ideologically charged political fights over issues of street space, public policy, and social justice. 

Historically San Francisco has hosted many activist demonstrations over its streets, from the freeway revolts of the 1960s to the first Critical Mass bicycle rides decades later. Today the city's planning and advocacy establishment is changing zoning laws to limit the number of parking spaces, encouraging new car-free housing near transit stations, and applying “transit first” policies, such as restricted bus lanes. Yet Henderson warns that the city's accomplishments should not be romanticized. Despite significant gains by livability advocates, automobiles continue to dominate the streets, and the city's financially strained bus system is slow and often unreliable. 

Both optimistic and cautionary, Henderson argues that ideology must be understood as part of the struggle for sustainable cities and that three competing points of view—progressive, neoliberal, and conservative—have come to dominate the contemporary discourse about urban mobility. Consistent with its iconic role as an incubator of environmental, labor, civil rights, and peace movements, San Francisco offers a compelling example of how the debate over sustainable urban transportation may unfold both in the United States and globally.