Industrial History

From St. Louis to New Orleans, from Baltimore to Oklahoma City, there are poor and minority neighborhoods so beset by pollution that just living in them can be hazardous to your health. Due to entrenched segregation, zoning ordinances that privilege wealthier communities, or because businesses have found the "paths of least resistance", there are many hazardous waste and toxic facilities in these communities, leading residents to experience health and wellness problems on top of the race and class discrimination most already experience.

The author of Baldwin's Harlem looks at the evolving culture, politics, economics, and spiritual life of Detroit - a blend of memoir, love letter, history, and clear-eyed reportage that explores the city's past, present, and future and its significance to the African American legacy and the nation's fabric.

Early in the 20th century, the Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), fought for the rights of workers-common laborers, migrants, immigrants, black workers-unprotected by the craft unions. In the face of beatings, kidnappings, and lynchings by vigilantes, company detectives, and hired guns, the Wobblies organized in mining and lumber camps, the wheat fields, on docksides and in textile factories.

No disease sparked as much dread in the 18th century as smallpox. The virus killed millions across the globe, carrying off one in every five victims and disfiguring survivors with tell-tale pitted scars. But one mysterious method offered hope: inoculation, the practice of piercing the skin to insert a drop of infected matter and induce a mild case of smallpox. Those inoculated safely were protected from the ‘Speckled Monster’ and stayed immune for life. Only one problem remained: convincing people to accept the treatment.

Beeronomics examines key developments that have moved the brewing industry forward. Its most ubiquitous ingredient, hops, was used by the Hanseatic League to establish the export dominance of Hamburg and Bremen in the 16th century. During the late 19th century, bottom-fermentation led to the spread of industrial lager beer. Industrial innovations in bottling, refrigeration, and TV advertising paved the way for the consolidation and market dominance of major macrobreweries during the 20th century.

The gripping story of a chemical weapons catastrophe, the cover-up, and how one American Army doctor’s discovery led to the development of the first drug to combat cancer, known today as chemotherapy.

We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey—from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants—uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal, and machine.

In Crash Course, Ingrassia answers the big questions: Was Detroit's self-destruction inevitable? What were the key turning points? Why did Japanese automakers manage American workers better than the American companies themselves? Ingrassia also describes dysfunctional corporate cultures (even as GM's market share plunged, the company continued business as usual) and Detroit's perverse system of "inverse layoffs" (which allowed union members to invoke seniority to avoid work).

Research on this syndrome continues to evolve, but in the meantime patients and their medical providers are left feeling lost and hopeless. In this new and exciting audiobook, dual-boarded neuropsychiatrist J.D. Claunch, MD dives into the symptoms, diagnosis, and treatment of long COVID. More than just the science of this illness, Dr. Claunch paints a picture of the suffering and medical trauma experienced by patients with long COVID and older versions of this post-infectious chronic illness, like chronic Lyme and myalgic encephalomyelitis.

Jede Krankheit und jeder Mensch haben das Potential, Medizingeschichte zu schreiben. Seit Hunderten von Jahren ergründen Ärzte und Ärztinnen auf der ganzen Welt die Geheimnisse der Medizin, indem sie sich echte Fälle ansehen. Autor und Arzt Roy Benaroch hat für uns spannende Fälle der Medizingeschichte gesammelt, in denen bekannte Persönlichkeiten der Weltgeschichte als mysteriöser Patient oder Patientin vor uns stehen.

In 1999, Munjed Al Muderis was a surgical resident working in Baghdad when the military police marched into the operating theatre and ordered the team to mutilate army deserters. When the head of surgery refused, he was executed. Munjed's choices were stark - comply and breach the medical oath, refuse and face death or flee. That day, Munjed's life changed forever. He escaped to Indonesia and boarded a boat to Australia.

El retrato demoledor de una dinastía cuya fortuna se construyó gracias a Valium y cuya reputación fue destruida por OxyContin.

From Canada’s top war historian, a definitive medical history of the Great War, illuminating how the carnage of modern battle gave birth to revolutionary life-saving innovations. It brings to light shocking revelations of the ways the brutality of combat and the necessity of agonizing battlefield decisions led to unimaginable strain for men and women of medicine who fought to save the lives of soldiers.

Big Tobacco Versus the World Cigarettes: the only consumer product that kills half its loyal customers when used exactly as intended. Yet somehow, for over a century, they’ve been marketed with charm, sophistication, cowboy hats, and cartoon camels. What gives? Big Tobacco Versus the World is a wry, sharp-eyed look at how a global industry managed to hook billions, bury the evidence, and keep the profits rolling while the bodies piled up. It’s a tale of manipulation, addiction, denial, and the people fighting back with facts, lawsuits, and a lot more stamina than a chain-smoker’s ...

Sigmund Freud revolutionized the way in which we think about ourselves. From its beginnings as a theory of neurosis Freud developed psychoanalysis into a general psychology, which became widely accepted as the predominant mode of discussing personality and interpersonal relationships. Anthony Storr goes one step further and investigates the status of Freud's legacy today and the disputes that surround it.

Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte's Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States.

Weaving together information from official sources and personal interviews, Barbara Tomblin gives the first full-length account of the US Army Nurse Corps in the Second World War. She describes how over 60,000 army nurses, all volunteers, cared for sick and wounded American soldiers in every theater of the war, serving in the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, the frozen reaches of Alaska and Iceland, the mud of Italy and northern Europe, or the heat and dust of the Middle East.

Meet the Luddites, a 19th-century brotherhood of rebels who vowed to annihilate every last one of the newfangled spinning machines that cost thousands their jobs. The Luddites' riots are indefensible, at least from the standpoint of violence, but they beg the question of whether the protests were nonsensical acts of rage carried out by thugs who sought to exploit imagined fears or desperate measures taken by those who felt neglected by the government. The Luddites chronicles the revolution and the negative reaction to it.

This classic book is the whole unruly story of dance music in one volume. It recreates the dance floors that made history, conjuring their atmosphere with loving detail and bringing you the voices of the DJs and clubbers at their heart—from grime, garage, house, hip hop and disco, to techno, soul, reggae, rock 'n' roll and EDM. Whether musical outlaw, obsessive crate-digger or overpaid superstar, the DJ has been at the spinning centre of nightlife for a century, making parties wilder, pushing clubbers harder and driving music into completely new shapes and styles.

Did I do that?! When asked to name a successor, Alexander the Great declared that his empire should go "to the strongest". But would rival factions have descended into war if he'd been a little more specific? What if the Vienna School of Art took a chance on a hopeful young student named Adolf Hitler? If Pope Clement VII granted King Henry VIII an annulment, England would likely still be Catholic today - and so would America.