Texas Takes Wing

Author : Barbara Ganson
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292754086
Total Pages : 313 pages
Book Rating : 4.89/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Texas Takes Wing written by Barbara Ganson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2014-01-06 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the hundred-year history of aviation in Texas, aviator and historian Barbara Ganson brings to life the colorful personalities that shaped the phenomenally successful development of this industry in the state. Weaving stories and profiles of aviators, designers, manufacturers, and those in related services, Texas Takes Wing covers the major trends that propelled Texas to the forefront of the field. Covering institutions from San Antonio’s Randolph Air Force Base (the West Point of this branch of service) to Brownsville’s airport with its Pan American Airlines instrument flight school (which served as an international gateway to Latin America as early as the 1920s) to Houston’s Johnson Space Center, home of Mission Control for the U.S. space program, the book provides an exhilarating timeline and engaging history of dozens of unsung pioneers as well as their more widely celebrated peers. Drawn from personal interviews as well as major archives and the collections of several commercial airlines, including American, Southwest, Braniff, Pan American Airways, and Continental, this sweeping history captures the story of powered flight in Texas since 1910. With its generally favorable flying weather, flat terrain, and wide open spaces, Texas has more airports than any other state and is often considered one of America’s most aviation-friendly places. Texas Takes Wing also explores the men and women who made the region pivotal in military training, aircraft manufacturing during wartime, general aviation, and air servicing of the agricultural industry. The result is a soaring history that will delight aviators and passengers alike.

Author : Nancy Price Graff
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 9780618535910
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.18/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taking Wing written by Nancy Price Graff and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2005 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gus never imagined himself a parent at thirteen. But in the war-fraught summer of 1942, while living on his grandparents' Vermont farm, he adopts a clutch of orphaned duck eggs. Gus can relate to the foundlings, as he is apart from, and yearns for, his own family. One day Gus finds a young stranger standing over the incubating eggs. Gus doesn't know what to make of her, with her tattered clothing and strange accent, but soon the girl is helping to care for the newly hatched ducklings, and she and Gus become fast friends. Not everyone shares Gus's high opinion of Louise, whose poverty-stricken French-Canadian family is shunned by the townspeople. His attempt to help his friend and her family has some embarrassing consequences and he must make retribution if he is to keep Louise's friendship. Nancy Price Graff's fluid narrative and exceptional eye for detail follow Gus during a time of food rationing, Victory gardens, watching for enemy planes--and keeping his ducks from harm.

Author : Pat Shipman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 0684849658
Total Pages : 344 pages
Book Rating : 4.52/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Taking Wing written by Pat Shipman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-01-15 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1861, just a few years after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, a scientist named Hermann von Meyer made an amazing discovery. Hidden in the Bavarian region of Germany was a fossil skeleton so exquisitely preserved that its wings and feathers were as obvious as its reptilian jaws and tail. This transitional creature offered tangible proof of Darwin's theory of evolution. Hailed as the First Bird, Archaeopteryx has remained the subject of heated debates for the last 140 years. Are birds actually living dinosaurs? Where does the fossil record really lead? Did flight originate from the "ground up" or "trees down"? Pat Shipman traces the age-old human desire to soar above the earth and to understand what has come before us. Taking Wing is science as adventure story, told with all the drama by which scientific understanding unfolds.

Author : David T. Courtwright
Publisher : Texas A&M University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781585444199
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.97/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sky As Frontier written by David T. Courtwright and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at how aviation's frontier lasted only a scant 3 decades, then vanished as commercial and military imperatives made flying routine.

Author : Gail Collins
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 13 : 0871404753
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

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Download or read book As Texas Goes...: How the Lone Star State Hijacked the American Agenda written by Gail Collins and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2012-06-04 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Gail Collins is the funniest serious political commentator in America. Reading As Texas Goes… is pure pleasure from page one.” —Rachel Maddow As Texas Goes . . . provides a trenchant yet often hilarious look into American politics and the disproportional influence of Texas, which has become the model for not just the Tea Party but also the Republican Party. Now with an expanded introduction and a new concluding chapter that will assess the influence of the Texas way of thinking on the 2012 election, Collins shows how the presidential race devolved into a clash between the so-called “empty places” and the crowded places that became a central theme in her book. The expanded edition will also feature more examples of the Texas style, such as Governor Rick Perry’s nearsighted refusal to accept federal Medicaid funding as well as the proposed ban on teaching “critical thinking” in the classroom. As Texas Goes . . . will prove to be even more relevant to American politics by the dawn of a new political era in January 2013.

Author : Lawrence Wright
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525435905
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book God Save Texas written by Lawrence Wright and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2019-03-05 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower—and a Texas native—takes us on a journey through the most controversial state in America. • “Beautifully written…. Essential reading [for] anyone who wants to understand how one state changed the trajectory of the country.” —NPR Texas is a red state, but the cities are blue and among the most diverse in the nation. Oil is still king, but Texas now leads California in technology exports. Low taxes and minimal regulation have produced extraordinary growth, but also striking income disparities. Texas looks a lot like the America that Donald Trump wants to create. Bringing together the historical and the contemporary, the political and the personal, Texas native Lawrence Wright gives us a colorful, wide-ranging portrait of a state that not only reflects our country as it is, but as it may become—and shows how the battle for Texas’s soul encompasses us all.

Author : Stephen Harrigan
Publisher : University of Texas Press
ISBN 13 : 0292759517
Total Pages : 944 pages
Book Rating : 4.10/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Big Wonderful Thing written by Stephen Harrigan and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 944 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of Texas is the story of struggle and triumph in a land of extremes. It is a story of drought and flood, invasion and war, boom and bust, and of the myriad peoples who, over centuries of conflict, gave rise to a place that has helped shape the identity of the United States and the destiny of the world. “I couldn’t believe Texas was real,” the painter Georgia O’Keeffe remembered of her first encounter with the Lone Star State. It was, for her, “the same big wonderful thing that oceans and the highest mountains are.” Big Wonderful Thing invites us to walk in the footsteps of ancient as well as modern people along the path of Texas’s evolution. Blending action and atmosphere with impeccable research, New York Times best-selling author Stephen Harrigan brings to life with novelistic immediacy the generations of driven men and women who shaped Texas, including Spanish explorers, American filibusters, Comanche warriors, wildcatters, Tejano activists, and spellbinding artists—all of them taking their part in the creation of a place that became not just a nation, not just a state, but an indelible idea. Written in fast-paced prose, rich with personal observation and a passionate sense of place, Big Wonderful Thing calls to mind the literary spirit of Robert Hughes writing about Australia or Shelby Foote about the Civil War. Like those volumes it is a big book about a big subject, a book that dares to tell the whole glorious, gruesome, epically sprawling story of Texas.

Author : Katherine Sharp Landdeck
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 1524762822
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.27/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Women with Silver Wings written by Katherine Sharp Landdeck and published by Crown. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, women pilots went aloft to serve their nation. . . . A soaring tale in which, at long last, these daring World War II pilots gain the credit they deserve.”—Liza Mundy, New York Times bestselling author of Code Girls “A powerful story of reinvention, community and ingenuity born out of global upheaval.”—Newsday When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Cornelia Fort was already in the air. At twenty-two, Fort had escaped Nashville’s debutante scene for a fresh start as a flight instructor in Hawaii. She and her student were in the middle of their lesson when the bombs began to fall, and they barely made it back to ground that morning. Still, when the U.S. Army Air Forces put out a call for women pilots to aid the war effort, Fort was one of the first to respond. She became one of just over 1,100 women from across the nation to make it through the Army’s rigorous selection process and earn her silver wings. The brainchild of trailblazing pilots Nancy Love and Jacqueline Cochran, the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) gave women like Fort a chance to serve their country—and to prove that women aviators were just as skilled as men. While not authorized to serve in combat, the WASP helped train male pilots for service abroad, and ferried bombers and pursuits across the country. Thirty-eight WASP would not survive the war. But even taking into account these tragic losses, Love and Cochran’s social experiment seemed to be a resounding success—until, with the tides of war turning, Congress clipped the women’s wings. The program was disbanded, the women sent home. But the bonds they’d forged never failed, and over the next few decades they came together to fight for recognition as the military veterans they were—and for their place in history.

Author : Mel Brown
Publisher : Arcadia Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1439628041
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.41/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wings Over San Antonio written by Mel Brown and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2001-02-15 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 1910, Lt. Benjamin Foulois was ordered to Fort Sam Houston near San Antonio, Texas, with a used Wright Brothers aeroplane and a small contingent of enlisted men. His mission was to teach himself how to operate this primitive flying machine and begin demonstrating the practical uses it might have for the United States Army. This history is chronicled through in-depth captions and over 200 images as author Mel Brown tells the story of how San Antonio eventually became the cradle of military aviation. Mastery of the air would take time, equipment, and lives as the demanding flight path led from the early trials at Ft. Sam to the eventual establishment of four flying centers around the city. Working through trial and error, the aeronautic pioneers and first combat aviators convinced the military that the building of an American air arm was needed; thus the legend of the U.S. Air Force at San Antonio was born. Using many photographs never before published, the author tells the rich history of the air force bases in San Antonio, including Kelly, Brooks, and Randolph Fields. Also included are images of some of aviation's first heroes, such as Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and Clair Chennault.

Author : E.D. Baker
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1599908069
Total Pages : 338 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Wings written by E.D. Baker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2011-04-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tamisin has always been a little weird. Her freckles actually look more like sparkles and occasionally, she likes to dance under the full moon. Then one day, wings sprout from her back, and Tamisin learns that her parents adopted her from fairyland. Inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream, this fairy tale will delight fans of The Tales of the Frog Princess and new readers alike.