'Wonderfully warm and funny' Cathy Woodman, bestselling author of Trust Me I'm A Vet Will is a Yorkshire lad, through and through. He's in his element when he's outside in the country air, not stuck in a classroom wasting his youth and the beauty of Yorkshire. When he starts as an apprentice farrier, his first few days are a baptism of fire. His fellow apprentice is a wind-up merchant and his gruff boss, Stanley, ribs him mercilessly about his tea drinking habit. But in this chaotic environment, the three of them form a brotherhood, and soon, Will realises that the coming year is going to teach him a lot more than how to shoe a horse properly... A charming story full of dry Yorkshire humour and warmth - a must-read for fans of James Herriot, Clare Balding, Countryfile and The Shepherd's Life.

Ideal for beginners or those looking to brush up their skills, this quick-reference overview explains the basics of all aspects of blacksmithing. With more than 450 photos and a focus on only the most essential tools and equipment, it keeps the information simple for the beginner. Summaries cover the tools of forging, their uses, and the essential equipment in the work space; the differences among free-form forging, drop forging, industrial, hot work, and cold work; the steps of the process, such as bending, joining, riveting, welding, chiseling off, and splitting; and the chemistry of iron and steel. The book also shows a gallery of 44 types of forged items, from hooks to tool handles, with comments on their forged features.

Editors Altan (Ohio State University), Ngaile (North Carolina University), and Shen (Ladish Company, Inc.) offer this extensive overview of the latest developments in the design of forging operations and dies. Basic technological principles are briefly reviewed in the first two chapters.

The handbook provides design engineers with up-to-date information about the many aspects of forging including descriptions of important developments made more recently by industry and/or government. The handbook describes suitable measures for in-process quality control and quality assurance, summarizes relationships between forging practices and important mechanical properties and compares various forging devices to aid in equipment selection. Attention is also given to describing practices for relatively new materials and emerging forging practices. (Modified author abstract).

From Mexico to Vietnam, from Nicaragua to Lebanon, and more recently to Kosovo, East Timor and now Iraq, the United States has intervened in the affairs of other nations. Yet American leaders continue to promote the myth that America is benevolent and peace-loving, and involves itself in conflicts only to defend the rights of others; excesses and cruelties, though sometimes admitted, usually are regarded as momentary aberrations.This classic book is the first truly comprehensive history of American imperialism. Now fully updated, and featuring a new introduction by Howard Zinn, it is a must-read for all students and scholars of American history. Renowned author Sidney Lens shows how the United States, from the time it gained its own independence, has used every available means - political, economic, and military - to dominate other nations.Lens presents a powerful argument, meticulously pieced together from a huge array of sources, to prove that imperialism is an inevitable consequence of the U.S. economic system. Surveying the pressures, external and internal, on the United States today, he concludes that like any other empire, the reign of the U.S. will end -- and he examines how this time of reckoning may come about.

As entrenched bureaucracies, military organizations might reasonably be expected to be especially resistant to reform and favor only limited, incremental adjustments. Yet, since 1945, the U.S. Army has rewritten its capstone doctrine manual, Operations, fourteen times. While some modifications have been incremental, collectively they reflect a significant evolution in how the Army approaches warfare—making the U.S. Army a crucial and unique case of a modern land power that is capable of change. So what accounts for this anomaly? What institutional processes have professional officers developed over time to escape bureaucracies' iron cage? Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.

Cuba's geographic proximity to the United States and its centrality to U.S. imperial designs following the War of 1898 led to the creation of a unique relationship between Afro-descended populations in the two countries. In Forging Diaspora, Frank