front cover of The Airway to Everywhere
The Airway to Everywhere
A History of All American Aviation, 1937–1953
W. David Lewis
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988
This book chronicles the history of All American Aviation of western Pennsylvania, a commercial airline pioneer. The brainchild of self-styled inventor Dr. Lytle S. Adams and Richard C. du Pont, the company began as an airmail delivery carrier, taking advantage of the Experimental Air Mail Act passed by Congress in 1938. The Airway to Everywhere relates the exciting early days of airmail delivery—hair-raising tales of courageous pilots who scooped mail bags tethered to wires strung between poles on makeshift airfields. The story of this airline is placed within the context a typical twentieth-century American business pattern-where technological innovation is followed by development and commercial application, followed by government subsidies and corporate takeovers. In that vein, All American Aviation would become Allegheny Airlines, and later, U.S. Air.
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front cover of Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District
Sloss Furnaces and the Rise of the Birmingham District
An Industrial Epic
W. David Lewis
University of Alabama Press, 1994
This pathbreaking book tells the dramatic story of a unique manufacturing complex and the city that it helped to create. The events recounted and  interpreted by W. David Lewis are of more than local or regional significance. The rise of Sloss furnaces and Birmingham epitomized the emergence of the United States as the world's foremost economic power.  Similarly, the closing of a once-profitable ironmaking installation amid social and technological changes that convulsed Birmingham nine decades after the city's founding typified challenges that were facing America at the dawn of the postindustrial age.
 
Above all,  Sloss Furnaces resonates with the class of competition and the frenetic energy with which southerners joined other Americans in a rush to transform a continent after a fratricidal drive for independence had failed. The sweeping narrative that Lewis has produced amply justifies its subtitle, An Industrial Epic.
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