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Book Rise of the Rocket Girls

Download or read book Rise of the Rocket Girls written by Nathalia Holt and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The riveting true story of the women who launched America into space. In the 1940s and 50s, when the newly minted Jet Propulsion Laboratory needed quick-thinking mathematicians to calculate velocities and plot trajectories, they didn't turn to male graduates. Rather, they recruited an elite group of young women who, with only pencil, paper, and mathematical prowess, transformed rocket design, helped bring about the first American satellites, and made the exploration of the solar system possible. For the first time, Rise of the Rocket Girls tells the stories of these women -- known as "human computers" -- who broke the boundaries of both gender and science. Based on extensive research and interviews with all the living members of the team, Rise of the Rocket Girls offers a unique perspective on the role of women in science: both where we've been, and the far reaches of space to which we're heading. "If Hidden Figures has you itching to learn more about the women who worked in the space program, pick up Nathalia Holt's lively, immensely readable history, Rise of the Rocket Girls." -- Entertainment Weekly

Book Summary and Analysis of Rise of the Rocket Girls  The Women Who Propelled Us  from Missiles to the Moon to Mars

Download or read book Summary and Analysis of Rise of the Rocket Girls The Women Who Propelled Us from Missiles to the Moon to Mars written by Worth Books and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Rise of the Rocket Girls tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Nathalia Holt’s book. Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader. This short summary and analysis of Rise of the Rocket Girls includes: Historical context Chapter-by-chapter overviews Profiles of the main characters Detailed timeline of key events Important quotes Fascinating trivia Glossary of terms Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work About Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt: When the Jet Propulsion Laboratory first began researching rocket science and the possibilities within space exploration in the middle of the twentieth century, they hired a hyper intelligent group of female mathematicians to work with their staff of engineers. In Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars, Nathalia Holt examines four decades of the JPL’s major accomplishments from interviews and research of these groundbreaking women who were recruited to be “human computers,” Including, from this team of unsung heroes, Barbara Paulson, Helen Ling, Sue Finley, and Sylvia Lundy. As the JPL’s projects evolved from developing missiles and satellites to executing moon landings and planetary exploration projects, the women’s roles grew too, becoming the team responsible for launching America into Space—and they did it all while balancing marriage and children, too. The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.

Book The Queens of Animation

    Book Details:
  • Author : Nathalia Holt
  • Publisher : Little, Brown
  • Release : 2019-10-22
  • ISBN : 0316439169
  • Pages : 400 pages

Download or read book The Queens of Animation written by Nathalia Holt and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-10-22 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls, the untold, "richly detailed" story of the women of Walt Disney Studios, who shaped the iconic films that have enthralled generations (Margot Lee Shetterly, New York Times bestselling author of Hidden Figures). From Snow White to Moana, from Pinocchio to Frozen, the animated films of Walt Disney Studios have moved and entertained millions. But few fans know that behind these groundbreaking features was an incredibly influential group of women who fought for respect in an often ruthless male-dominated industry and who have slipped under the radar for decades. In The Queens of Animation, bestselling author Nathalia Holt tells their dramatic stories for the first time, showing how these women infiltrated the boys' club of Disney's story and animation departments and used early technologies to create the rich artwork and unforgettable narratives that have become part of the American canon. As the influence of Walt Disney Studios grew -- and while battling sexism, domestic abuse, and workplace intimidation -- these women also fought to transform the way female characters are depicted to young audiences. With gripping storytelling, and based on extensive interviews and exclusive access to archival and personal documents, The Queens of Animation reveals the vital contributions these women made to Disney's Golden Age and their continued impact on animated filmmaking, culminating in the record-shattering Frozen, Disney's first female-directed full-length feature film. A Best Book of 2019: Library Journal, Christian Science Monitor, and Financial Times

Book Rocket Girl

Download or read book Rocket Girl written by George D. Morgan and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combining personal history with dramatic historical events, this extraordinary true story of America's first female rocket scientist shows how her talent for chemistry proved essential for America's early space program.

Book Wise Gals

    Book Details:
  • Author : Nathalia Holt
  • Publisher : Icon Books
  • Release : 2023-02-02
  • ISBN : 1785789597
  • Pages : 422 pages

Download or read book Wise Gals written by Nathalia Holt and published by Icon Books. This book was released on 2023-02-02 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ** TO BE READ ON BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK FROM 30 JAN 2023 ** 'As much le Carré as it is Hidden Figures.' AMARYLLIS FOX, author of Life Undercover 'A sweeping epic of a book [which] rescues five remarkable women from obscurity and finally gives them their rightful place in world history ... A book you won't regret reading. Five women you won't forget.' KATE MOORE, author of The Radium Girls 'As entertaining as it is instructive.' GENERAL STANLEY MCCRYSTAL The never-before-told story of a small cadre of influential female spies in the precarious early days of the CIA - women who helped create the template for cutting-edge espionage (and blazed new paths for equality in the workplace). In the wake of World War II, four agents were critical in helping build a new organisation now known as the CIA. Adelaide Hawkins, Mary Hutchison, Eloise Page, and Elizabeth Sudmeier, called the 'wise gals' by their male colleagues because of their sharp sense of humour and even quicker intelligence, were not the stereotypical femme fatale of spy novels. They were smart, courageous, and groundbreaking agents at the top of their class, instrumental in both developing innovative tools for intelligence gathering - and insisting (in their own unique ways) that they receive the credit and pay their expertise deserved. Adelaide rose through the ranks, developing new cryptosystems that advanced how spies communicate with each other. Mary worked overseas in Europe and Asia, building partnerships and allegiances that would last decades. Elizabeth would risk her life in the Middle East in order to gain intelligence on deadly Soviet weaponry. Eloise would wield influence on scientific and technical operations worldwide, ultimately exposing global terrorism threats. Meticulously researched and beautifully told, Holt uses firsthand interviews with past and present officials and declassified government documents to uncover the stories of these four inspirational women. Wise Gals sheds a light on the untold history of the women whose daring foreign intrigues, domestic persistence, and fighting spirit have been and continue to be instrumental to the world's security.

Book The Glass Universe

    Book Details:
  • Author : Dava Sobel
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2017-10-31
  • ISBN : 0143111345
  • Pages : 353 pages

Download or read book The Glass Universe written by Dava Sobel and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-10-31 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From #1 New York Times bestselling author Dava Sobel, the "inspiring" (People), little-known true story of women's landmark contributions to astronomy A New York Times Book Review Notable Book Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Economist, Smithsonian, Nature, and NPR's Science Friday Nominated for the PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award "A joy to read.” —The Wall Street Journal In the mid-nineteenth century, the Harvard College Observatory began employing women as calculators, or “human computers,” to interpret the observations their male counterparts made via telescope each night. At the outset this group included the wives, sisters, and daughters of the resident astronomers, but soon the female corps included graduates of the new women's colleges—Vassar, Wellesley, and Smith. As photography transformed the practice of astronomy, the ladies turned from computation to studying the stars captured nightly on glass photographic plates. The “glass universe” of half a million plates that Harvard amassed over the ensuing decades—through the generous support of Mrs. Anna Palmer Draper, the widow of a pioneer in stellar photography—enabled the women to make extraordinary discoveries that attracted worldwide acclaim. They helped discern what stars were made of, divided the stars into meaningful categories for further research, and found a way to measure distances across space by starlight. Their ranks included Williamina Fleming, a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid who went on to identify ten novae and more than three hundred variable stars; Annie Jump Cannon, who designed a stellar classification system that was adopted by astronomers the world over and is still in use; and Dr. Cecilia Helena Payne, who in 1956 became the first ever woman professor of astronomy at Harvard—and Harvard’s first female department chair. Elegantly written and enriched by excerpts from letters, diaries, and memoirs, The Glass Universe is the hidden history of the women whose contributions to the burgeoning field of astronomy forever changed our understanding of the stars and our place in the universe.

Book The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space written by Juan Francisco Salazar and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-10 with total page 543 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Social Studies of Outer Space offers state-of-the-art overview of contemporary social and cultural research on outer space. International in scope, the thirty-eight contributions by over fifty leading researchers and artists across a variety of disciplines and fields of knowledge, present a range of debates and pose key questions about the crafting of futures in relation to outer space. The Handbook is a call to attend more carefully to engagements with outer space, empirically, affectively, and theoretically, while characterizing current research practices and outlining future research agendas. This recalibration opens profound questions of intersectional politics, race, equity, and environmental justice around the contested topics of space exploration and life off-Earth. Among the many themes included in the volume are the various infrastructures, networks and systems that enable and sustain space exploration; space heritage; the ethics of outer space; social and environmental justice; fundamental debates about life in outer space as it pertains to both astrobiology and SETI; the study of scientific communities; the human body and consciousness; Indigenous astronomical systems of Knowledge; contemporary space art; and ongoing critical interventions to overcome the legacies of colonialism and dismantle hegemonic narratives of outer space.

Book Space Feminisms

    Book Details:
  • Author : Marie-Pier Boucher
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2024-01-25
  • ISBN : 1350346330
  • Pages : 281 pages

Download or read book Space Feminisms written by Marie-Pier Boucher and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2024-01-25 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Employing a global approach to feminist theory, this book examines how scientific, popular, scholarly, and artistic imaginations of space have, since the 1950s, reflected and embedded Earthly hopes, anxieties, and futures. Rather than simply a platform for imagining the future, it cultivates radical and alternative modes of inquiry around space through seeing space as a material reality that reflexively encodes humans' self-perceptions of their planet and beyond. Bringing together essayistic reflections, artworks, and interviews with space scientists, engineers, and astronauts past and present in one volume, Space Feminisms inspects the transformation of terrestrially held notions of gender, race, class, and ableism as they migrate to the extraterrestrial, whilst drawing new connections between feminist thought and extraterrestrial power structures. Space Feminisms makes a radical enquiry into how earthly power structures are already expanding into our skies, facilitating a collaborative and interdisciplinary platform for scholars, artists, and designers to imagine radical constructions of human futures beyond Earth. At the intersection of scientific, cultural, social, and artistic speculations, the book gathers leading scholars, scientists, artists, and designers to develop innovative tactics and disruptive participations to create generative, alternative, and radical futures of and in space.

Book Her Space  Her Time

    Book Details:
  • Author : Shohini Ghose
  • Publisher : MIT Press
  • Release : 2023-10-17
  • ISBN : 0262375680
  • Pages : 268 pages

Download or read book Her Space Her Time written by Shohini Ghose and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-10-17 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exciting new title in the vein of Hidden Figures, which tells the inspiring stories of long-overlooked women physicists and astronomers who discovered the fundamental rules of the universe and reshaped the rules of society. Women physicists and astronomers from around the world have transformed science and society, but the critical roles they played in their fields are not always well-sung. Her Space, Her Time, authored by award-winning quantum physicist Shohini Ghose, brings together the stories of these remarkable women to celebrate their indelible scientific contributions. In each chapter of the book, Ghose explores a scientific topic and explains how the women featured in that chapter revolutionized that area of physics and astronomy. In doing so, she also addresses particular aspects of women’s experiences in physics and astronomy: in the chapter on time, for instance, we learn of Henrietta Leavitt and Margaret Burbidge, who helped discover the big bang and the cosmic calendar; in the chapter on space exploration, we learn of Anigaduwagi (Cherokee) aerospace scientist Mary Golda Ross, who helped make the Moon landings possible; and in the chapter on subatomic particles, we learn of Marietta Blau, Hertha Wambacher, and Bibha Chowdhuri, who contributed to the discovery of the building blocks of the universe, and, in doing so, played a crucial role in determining who gets to do physics today. Engaging, accessible, and timely, Her Space, Her Time is a collective story of scientific innovation, inspirational leadership, and overcoming invisibility that will leave a lasting impression on any reader curious about the rule-breakers and trendsetters who illuminated our understanding of the universe. Some of the featured women scientists in the book Williamina Fleming Annie Jump Cannon Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Antonia Maury Henrietta Leavitt Margaret Burbidge Mary Golda Ross Dilhan Eryurt Claudia Alexander Joyce Neighbors Navajo women of Shiprock Harriet Brooks Marie Curie Lise Meitner Marietta Blau Hertha Wambacher Bibha Chowdhuri Wu Chien-Shiung Women of the Manhattan Project Vera Rubin

Book Trailblazers  33 Women in Science Who Changed the World

Download or read book Trailblazers 33 Women in Science Who Changed the World written by Rachel Swaby and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Florence Nightingale. Sally Ride. Ada Lovelace. These names and others are etched in history and included here as part of an awe-inspiring collection of profiles of thirty-three of the most influential women in science—women whose vision, creativity, passion, and dedication have changed the world. Aspiring scientists, young history enthusiasts, and children who enjoy learning about the world will be fascinated by these riveting snapshots—and parents who enjoyed the film Hidden Figures will find this to be the perfect extension. Covering important advancements made by women in fields such as biology, medicine, astronomy, and technology, author Rachel Swaby explains that people aren’t born brilliant scientists. They observe and experiment as kids and as adults, testing ideas again and again, each time learning something new. Kids are sure to come away with a renewed curiosity about the world and the realization that the road to discovery can be positively thrilling. “This collective biography is most timely. An interesting, engaging collection . . . that will encourage readers to explore further and perhaps pursue their own scientific curiosities.” —Kirkus Reviews “The descriptions of the women’s lives often have a quiet poetry. Readers . . . will find much to admire in these accomplished and unconventional women.” —Publishers Weekly “Swaby’s powerful book serves as an indispensable reminder that women have always been essential to science and innovation. Certain to inspire the next generation of scientists.” —Nathalia Holt, New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, From Missiles to the Moon to Mars

Book Electronic Inspirations

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jennifer Iverson
  • Publisher : New Cultural History of Music
  • Release : 2018-12-27
  • ISBN : 0190868198
  • Pages : 321 pages

Download or read book Electronic Inspirations written by Jennifer Iverson and published by New Cultural History of Music. This book was released on 2018-12-27 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a decimated post-war West Germany, the electronic music studio at the WDR radio in Cologne was a beacon of hope. Jennifer Iverson's Electronic Inspirations: Technologies of the Cold War Musical Avant-Garde traces the reclamation and repurposing of wartime machines, spaces, and discourses into the new sounds of the mid-century studio. In the 1950s, when technologies were plentiful and the need for reconstruction was great, West Germany began to rebuild its cultural prestige via aesthetic and technical advances. The studio's composers, collaborating with scientists and technicians, coaxed music from sine-tone oscillators, noise generators, band-pass filters, and magnetic tape. Together, they applied core tenets from information theory and phonetics, reclaiming military communication technologies as well as fascist propaganda broadcasting spaces. The electronic studio nurtured a revolutionary synthesis of science, technology, politics, and aesthetics. Its esoteric sounds transformed mid-century music and continue to reverberate today. Electronic music--echoing both cultural anxiety and promise--is a quintessential Cold War innovation.

Book Escaping Gravity

Download or read book Escaping Gravity written by Lori Garver and published by Diversion Books. This book was released on 2022-06-21 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A former NASA deputy administrator recounts how she battled greed and corruption to revolutionize the agency and usher in a new space age. Escaping Gravity is former NASA Deputy Administrator Lori Garver’s firsthand account of how a handful of revolutionaries overcame the political patronage and bureaucracy that threatened the space agency. The success of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, and countless other commercial space efforts were preceded by decades of work by a group of people Garver calls “space pirates.” Their quest to transform NASA put Garver in the crosshairs of Congress, the aerospace industry, and hero-astronauts trying to protect their own profits and mythology within a system that had held power since the 1950s. As the head of the NASA transition team for President-elect Barack Obama and second-in-command of the agency, Garver drove policies and funding that enabled commercial competition just as the capabilities and resources of the private sector began to mature. She was determined to deliver more valuable programs, which required breaking the self-interested space-industrial cycle that, like the military, preferred to spend billions of taxpayer dollars on programs aimed to sustain jobs and contracts in key congressional districts. The result: more efficiency and greater progress. Including insider NASA conversations and insights on how the US space industry has been transformed to become the envy of the world and is ushering in a new space age, Escaping Gravity offers a blueprint for how to drive productive and meaningful change. Praise for Escaping Gravity “Former NASA official Lori Garver offers a front-row seat to the decades-long struggles within and among space bureaucrats and space billionaires. Bring popcorn, as you bear witness to an untold slice of space history.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist and author of Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier “We are living at the most exciting time in space exploration since the Apollo era, in part because the world’s largest space agency, NASA, got around to trying something new, the funding of commercial crews. Lori Garver tells it like it is . . . or was for a woman effecting change at NASA despite men of the military industrial complex—and their cost-plus contracts. It wasn’t rocket science, it was much harder than that. Don’t take my word(s) for it; read this book.” —Bill Nye, CEO, The Planetary Society “A scathing memoir that shows the ugly side of NASA while offering hope for a better future for the space agency.” —Kirkus Reviews

Book Moonbound

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jonathan Fetter-Vorm
  • Publisher : Hill and Wang
  • Release : 2019-06-04
  • ISBN : 1466899352
  • Pages : 256 pages

Download or read book Moonbound written by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm and published by Hill and Wang. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On a summer night in 1969, two men climbed down a ladder onto a sea of dust at the edge of an ancient dream. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first set foot on lunar soil, the moon ceased to be a place of mystery and myth. It became a destination. Now, on the fiftieth anniversary of that journey, Moonbound tells the monumental story of the moon and the men who went there first. With vibrant images and meticulous attention to detail, Jonathan Fetter-Vorm conjures the long history of the visionaries, stargazers, builders, and adventurers who sent Apollo 11 on its legendary voyage. From the wisdom of the Babylonians to the intrigues of the Cold War, from the otherworldly discoveries of Galileo to the dark legacy of Nazi atrocities, from the exhilarating trajectories of astronauts—recounted in their own words—to the unsung brilliance of engineers working behind the scenes, Moonbound captures the grand arc of the Space Age in a graphic history of unprecedented scope and profound lyricism.

Book The Woman Who Smashed Codes

Download or read book The Woman Who Smashed Codes written by Jason Fagone and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Bestseller NPR Best Book of the Year “Not all superheroes wear capes, and Elizebeth Smith Friedman should be the subject of a future Wonder Woman movie.” —The New York Times Joining the ranks of Hidden Figures and In the Garden of Beasts, the incredible true story of the greatest codebreaking duo that ever lived, an American woman and her husband who invented the modern science of cryptology together and used it to confront the evils of their time, solving puzzles that unmasked Nazi spies and helped win World War II. In 1916, at the height of World War I, brilliant Shakespeare expert Elizebeth Smith went to work for an eccentric tycoon on his estate outside Chicago. The tycoon had close ties to the U.S. government, and he soon asked Elizebeth to apply her language skills to an exciting new venture: code-breaking. There she met the man who would become her husband, groundbreaking cryptologist William Friedman. Though she and Friedman are in many ways the "Adam and Eve" of the NSA, Elizebeth’s story, incredibly, has never been told. In The Woman Who Smashed Codes, Jason Fagone chronicles the life of this extraordinary woman, who played an integral role in our nation’s history for forty years. After World War I, Smith used her talents to catch gangsters and smugglers during Prohibition, then accepted a covert mission to discover and expose Nazi spy rings that were spreading like wildfire across South America, advancing ever closer to the United States. As World War II raged, Elizebeth fought a highly classified battle of wits against Hitler’s Reich, cracking multiple versions of the Enigma machine used by German spies. Meanwhile, inside an Army vault in Washington, William worked furiously to break Purple, the Japanese version of Enigma—and eventually succeeded, at a terrible cost to his personal life. Fagone unveils America’s code-breaking history through the prism of Smith’s life, bringing into focus the unforgettable events and colorful personalities that would help shape modern intelligence. Blending the lively pace and compelling detail that are the hallmarks of Erik Larson’s bestsellers with the atmosphere and intensity of The Imitation Game, The Woman Who Smashed Codes is page-turning popular history at its finest.

Book Science Fiction and Futurism

Download or read book Science Fiction and Futurism written by Ace G. Pilkington and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science and science fiction have become inseparable--with common stories, interconnected thought experiments, and shared language. This reference book lays out that relationship and its all-but-magical terms and ideas. Those who think seriously about the future are changing the world, reshaping how we speak and how we think. This book fully covers the terms that collected, clarified and crystallized the futurists' ideas, sometimes showing them off, sometimes slowing them down, and sometimes propelling them to fame and making them the common currency of our culture. The many entries in this encyclopedic work offer a guided tour of the vast territories occupied by science fiction and futurism. In his Foreword, David Brin says, "Provocative and enticing? Filled with 'huh!' moments and leads to great stories? That describes this volume."

Book The Gender of Things

Download or read book The Gender of Things written by Maria Rentetzi and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-09-29 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gender of Things is a highly interdisciplinary book that explores the power relationship between gender and the material culture of technoscience, addressing a seemingly straightforward question: How does a thing—such as a spacesuit, a humanoid robot, or a surgical instrument—become a gendered object? These 14 short chapters cover an original selection of “things”: from cosmeceuticals to early motor scooters, from Scrum boards to border walls, and from robots to the human body and its parts. By historically examining how significance has been attached to specific things and how things were designed and produced, the chapters reveal how the concept of gender has been embedded and finds expression in the material world of science and technology. With insights from science and technology studies (STS), anthropology, the history of ergonomics, museum studies, the history of science, technology, and medicine but also the philosophy and sociology of technology and feminist new materialism, this collection reminds us that our material creations not only bear knowledge about our world. The Gender of Things will be of key interest to undergraduate and graduate students and research scholars of STS as well as gender studies.