War Inventions

The end of Communism and breakup of the Soviet Union was a time of euphoria around the world, but Russia today is violently anti-American and dangerously nationalistic. So how did we go from the promise of those days to the autocratic police state of Putin's new Russia? The Invention of Russia reaches back to the darkest days of the Cold War to tell the story of the fight for the soul of a nation.

In Masters of Death, Richard Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppen's role in the Holocaust. These "special task forces", organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into Eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than one and a half million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar.

In December of 1938, a chemist in a German laboratory made a shocking discovery: When placed next to radioactive material, a Uranium atom split in two. That simple discovery launched a scientific race that spanned three continents. In Great Britain and the United States, Soviet spies worked their way into the scientific community; in Norway, a commando force slipped behind enemy lines to attack German heavy-water manufacturing; and deep in the desert, one brilliant group of scientists was hidden away at a remote site at Los Alamos.

Welcome to the 2024 edition! You have a wonderful idea and want to make it real. What are the first steps? Many forces act on you to slow you down, but your imagination, creativity, and passion need to overcome these constraints. INTENSE DESIGN presents a time in history when great ideas became great products such as the SR-71 Blackbird. How did an organization shrug off all the problems associated with Mach 3 travel? INTENSE DESIGN considers the historical moderation and guidance of a successful design operation as well as providing practical advice for making designs come to reality. This...

The gentrification of Brooklyn has been one of the most striking developments in recent urban history. Considered one of the city's most notorious industrial slums in the 1940s and 1950s, Brownstone Brooklyn by the 1980s had become a post-industrial landscape of hip bars, yoga studios, and beautifully renovated, wildly expensive townhouses. In The Invention of Brownstone Brooklyn, Suleiman Osman offers a groundbreaking history of this unexpected transformation.

On March 9, 1862, the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia met in the Battle of Hampton Roads—the first time ironclad vessels would engage each other in combat. For four hours the two ships pummeled one another as thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers and civilians watched from the shorelines. Although the battle ended in a draw, this engagement would change the nature of naval warfare by informing both vessel design and battle tactics.

My Tank Is Fight! contains a humorous and exciting examination of 20 real inventions from World War II that never saw the light of day. Each entry includes full technical details, a complete development history, in-depth analysis, and a riveting fictionalized account of the invention's success or failure on the battlefield.

Entering World War II, America was emerging as a world power. Their geographic isolation from World War I allowed them to recover and prosper in the interwar era, and food invention during the Depression carried into World War II. Food items such as SPAM and M&Ms profoundly impacted the military, and were later incorporated into some American dishes after the war.

Prequel to the Evidence of Space War Series. Beginning in the year 2035, 41 years before "Natural Enemies, First Contact: 2081" this follows the story of Sara Perci, eventual inventor of the Gravity Drive and those who helped her along the way. From the Mediterranean Sea, to Germany, to Candlewood Lake, Ohio, and on to the caves of the moon, Sara's story unfolds. Eventually she settles on Planet Alpha, in order to study the ruins there, to write, and think. At least until the year 2081, when the crew of the "Ambassador" come to her for help.