A richly illustrated history of the first cross-country auto trips exposes the role of these well-publicized jaunts in changing the way the public felt about this new technology. (Transportation)

The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, on a hand-built dory named the "Emerald Mile," through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river.

This book introduces the latest thinking on the use of Big Data in the context of urban systems, including research and insights on human behavior, urban dynamics, resource use, sustainability and spatial disparities, where it promises improved planning, management and governance in the urban sectors (e.g., transportation, energy, smart cities, crime, housing, urban and regional economies, public health, public engagement, urban governance and political systems), as well as Big Data’s utility in decision-making, and development of indicators to monitor economic and social activity, and for urban sustainability, transparency, livability, social inclusion, place-making, accessibility and resilience.

By delving into the complex, cross-generational exchanges that characterize any political project as rampant as empire, this thought-provoking study focuses on children and their ambivalent, intimate relationships with maps and practices of mapping at the dawn of the "American Century." Considering children as students, map and puzzle makers, letter writers, and playmates, Mahshid Mayar interrogates the ways turn-of-the-century American children encountered, made sense of, and produced spatial narratives and cognitive maps of the United States and the world. Mayar further probes how children's diverse patterns of consuming, relating to, and appropriating the "truths" that maps represent turned cartography into a site of personal and political contention. To investigate where in the world the United States imagined itself at the end of the nineteenth century, this book calls for new modes of mapping the United States as it studies the nation on regional, hemispheric, and global scales. By examining the multilayered liaison between imperial pedagogy and geopolitical literacy across a wide range of archival evidence, Mayar delivers a careful microhistorical study of U.S. empire.

The audacity of driving a horseless carriage from coast to coast in the early years of the 20th century is hard to imagine in an age of superhighways and global positioning systems. Roads might be nothing more than muddy ruts made by wagon wheels; sources of gasoline or replacement parts were few and agonizingly far between; frequent repairs and tire changes were necessary; and the traveler was subject to the whole range of nature's perils and discomforts. For a woman to attempt the trip was, at the time, a jaw-dropping event. Yet in 1909, 22-year-old Alice Ramsey and three female companions piled into a Maxwell in New York City, and 59 days later they triumphantly rolled into San Francisco. A few years later silent film star Anita King would become the first woman to make the transcontinental drive solo. These and other early coast-to-coast drives proved women's growing independence, as well as the automobile's long-distance viability. Detailed accounts of five coast-to-coast drives make up this lively history. Drawing from plentiful contemporary newspaper reports and the women's own words, author Curt McConnell recounts the bold adventurers' experiences day by day and mile by mile.

This is the first biography of the important but long-forgotten American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins (1867-1934). Historian Donald G. Godfrey documents the life of Jenkins from his childhood in Indiana and early life in the West to his work as a prolific inventor whose productivity was cut short by an early death. Jenkins was an inventor who made a difference. As one of America's greatest independent inventors, Jenkins's passion was to meet the needs of his day and the future. In 1895 he produced the first film projector able to show a motion picture on a large screen, coincidentally igniting the first film boycott among his Quaker viewers when the film he screened showed a woman's ankle. Jenkins produced the first American television pictures in 1923, and developed the only fully operating broadcast television station in Washington, D.C. transmitting to ham operators from coast to coast as well as programming for his local audience. Godfrey's biography raises the profile of C. Francis Jenkins from his former place in the footnotes to his rightful position as a true pioneer of today's film and television. Along the way, it provides a window into the earliest days of both motion pictures and television as well as the now-vanished world of the independent inventor.