Bøker utgitt av McFarland & Company

In 1911, a legally deaf, beginner pilot with limited training and only 90 minutes of solo flying experience took on newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst's $50,000 challenge to be the first aviator to fly across America in 30 days or less. The transcontinental flight was considered by most to be an extremely dangerous and nearly impossible feat, considering roughly half of all pilots perished in the early years of aviation. Less than a decade since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, a time when less than two percent of the country had even seen an airplane, Calbraith "Cal" Perry Rodgers drew tens of thousands of people to watch him fly. He survived a grueling journey, making history by becoming the first person to complete an east-to-west transcontinental flight. In a flimsy aircraft prone to mechanical failure, Rodgers crashed an astonishing 16 times, narrowly avoiding death on numerous occasions. By the time he had reached California and the coast where he would land, on the sand at Long Beach, his story of courage and determination had captured the imagination of an entire nation. This book chronicles the life of Cal Rodgers and depicts the world of aviation during its adventurous, if dangerous, beginnings.

A sequel to the author's autobiographical trilogy--Shush! Growing up Jewish under Stalin, In the Jaws of the Crocodile, and Farewell, Mama Odessa--this book is part memoir and part cultural study about the challenges of immigration and American accculturation. With self-deprecating humor, the author, a former Soviet satirist who was punished for trespassing the boundaries of public criticism, recollects his growing pains as he overcame his indoctrinated upbringing in a totalitarian society to embrace America's defining values.

This work traces the history of a remarkable troop of Hoosier horsemen--the East Wing of the Third Indiana Cavalry--during the Civil War. From the backwaters of the war in eastern Maryland to the epicenter of cavalry action in the eastern theater, they fought at Antietam, Brandy Station, Gettysburg and around Petersburg, and helped subdue Confederate forces in the Shenandoah Valley. Along the way they served as spies and fought in dozens of vicious skirmishes and battles. At Appomattox, they escorted one of the most famous generals to come out of the war.

Has John Adams been forgotten? He is the only Founding Father without a major memorial in the nation's capital. When he lamented that "monuments will never be erected to me," he predicted as much. His pessimism was understandable, but it was unjustified: Adams has since been portrayed in numerous biographies, plays, musicals, poems, novels, and television shows. This is the first comprehensive overview of John Adams as he appears in scholarship and in popular culture. The second president is one-dimensional at times, and perhaps best known to the public as "obnoxious and disliked," but he is always fascinating. The varied ways in which biographers and artists represented Adams provide a glimpse into his character. These portrayals also provide insight into the various ways in which people continue to find meaning in the American Revolution and its aftermath.

How did Friday the 13th begin as a movie about a grieving mother killing camp counselors and spawn a movie in which a nanobot enhanced, hockey masked man destroys a space station? Similarly, how did A Nightmare on Elm Street evolve from a film by Wes Craven about Freddy Krueger into a film about Wes Craven making a Freddy Krueger movie? Film series are destined to change with time, but horror film series are often unrecognizable after multiple sequels and reboots. This work examines horror films and their sequels to determine the glue that holds individual franchises together, which films matter to a series' continuity, which should be considered as canon, and what goes into the process of continuing--or, in some cases, abandoning--the overarching storyline. Series covered include Friday the 13th, Halloween, Child's Play, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Leprechaun, and Scream.

For more than six decades, reggae legend Glen DaCosta has worked as a musician, songwriter and producer. As a session player, his distinctive sax sound backed many international reggae stars at Joe Gibbs' Studio and Lee Scratch Perry's Blackheart Studio. Twenty-two years in the writing, his revealing memoir gives an insider's view of the Jamaican popular music industry, and recounts his fascinating childhood and years on the road with Bob Marley and the Wailers and Zap Pow.

The 1994 Major League Baseball season promised to be memorable. Long-standing batting and pitching standards were threatened, including the revered single-season home run record. The Montreal Expos and New York Yankees were delivering remarkable campaigns. In August, acting commissioner Bud Selig called a halt to the season amid the League's latest labor dispute. The shutdown led to a lockout as well as cancellation of more than 900 regular season games, the scheduled expanded rounds of playoffs, and that year's World Series. Like all labor struggles, it was fundamentally about control--of salaries, of players' ability to decide their own fates, and of the game itself. This book chronicles Major League Baseball's turbulent '94 season and its ripple effects. It highlights earlier labor struggles and the roles performed by individuals from John Montgomery Ward, David Fultz and Robert Murphy to Marvin Miller, Andy Messersmith, Jim "Catfish" Hunter and Donald Fehr. Also examined are the ballplayers' own organizations, from the Players League of the early 1890s to the still potent Major League Baseball Players Association doing battle with team owners and their representatives.

The Revolutionary War was nearing its end in early 1783. In his Hudson Highlands stronghold, General Washington kept a wary eye on the British force in New York City, 60 miles away. His army, owed months of back pay, and his officers frustrated by the negotiations over their promised pension, chafed under martial authority. A nationalist faction in Congress seized upon this discontent to instigate the Newburgh Conspiracy, a plot by Continental Army officers to menace civil officials who opposed the Impost, a 5% tax on imports to be collected by the central government, to satisfy the nation's debts. The army--by this time a formidable force of seasoned veterans--was provoked into threatening the very liberties it had fought to defend. This book examines this last major crisis of the Revolution, when Washington stood between his men and the American people.

This is a book about composite materials, written from the perspective of someone who has been in the industry for more than four decades and had to learn about them the hard way. Aimed at the curious citizen scientist or maker, it is written in an accessible, entertaining, and jargon-free style, introducing and explaining the how and why of composite materials. Following a history of composites, the book discusses the periodic table of elements and why getting to know this table is so important. It then introduces strings (fibers) and glues (matrices or resins) and explains how they're put together, how to design with them, and how to analyze what you've designed. The work also describes the composites business and includes a list of good schools and their involvement with industry.

Dwight Little's Hollywood career includes directing and producing major motion pictures for multiple studios, acclaimed television series and even video games. In this memoir, he takes readers along on a movie-making adventure that is by turns funny and brutally honest. There are many on-set interactions with well-known producers and stars along with detailed descriptions of film shoots from the wilds of India to the banks of the River Kwai. Included are tales from the jails of Madrid to the jungles of Fiji and the cold war streets of Budapest. The work seamlessly connects the Golden Age of Hollywood to the highly successful premium television of today. Make or break creative battles, Hollywood intrigues, unpredictable studio executives, and temperamental actors are all documented in colorful detail. Whether the reader is an aspiring filmmaker or just a movie lover, this book has it all, including a unique insight into television directing in the new streaming age and 41 photos, many on-set.

Designed to locate and sink German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic, the escort carrier USS Bogue (CVE-9) became the most successful Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) carrier of World War II. This book covers the construction and commissioning of the Bogue, as well as the deployment of Naval Aviation composite squadrons that launched missions from the flight deck. Day-to-day operations are chronicled in comprehensive detail, along with developments in ASW tactics and the breaking of Germany's Enigma Naval Code, which enabled U.S. Navy forces in the Atlantic to take the offensive.

The 1940s saw the birth of many enduring superheroes like Superman, Batman, Captain America and Captain Marvel. Outside of the superhero genre, the golden age of comics also featured a host of lesser-known, evil-fighting action figures, and this book contains a wealth of information about these heroes without capes. Covered here are jungle heroines like Sheena, Rulah and Princess Pantha; science fiction stalwarts including Spacehawk, Hunt Bowman and Futura; adventurers such as Kayo Kirby, Werewolf Hunter and Senorita Rio; and Western heroes ranging from Tom Mix to the Ghost Rider.

America's entrance into the wars in Vietnam came as a result of several factors. Among them was the necessity of bolstering French influence in the area in the face of mounting communist expansion. This expansion was intensified by the outbreak of the Korean War, making it necessary for the United States to revamp its Southeast Asian policy. During the French era, control of Vietnam's rivers, streams and canals became necessary. This led various factions to develop specialized military units heavily dependent on new types of river craft that could traverse the myriad waterways in Vietnam. The focal point of this study is a new assessment of the conduct of river warfare. Drawing on little-known French, Vietnamese and American sources and materials, it sheds light on an important aspect of the Vietnam War. Chapters also detail numerous aspects of river warfare not generally covered in other books on the subject.

This portrait of Calvin Coolidge reveals an astute politician and thinker seeking to restrain the unprecedented spending pressures of the 1920s and maintain a limited role for the federal government within his definition of progressivism. He did so without a strong party caucus in Congress. Instead, he used considerable rhetorical skills, a knack for publicity, and the advent of radio and other new forms of mass-circulation media to sway public opinion and keep his priorities at the forefront of national politics throughout his presidency. The book argues that, although Coolidge has been seen as the inspiration for supply-side economics and tax cuts amid growing budget deficits since the 1980s, his policy was to secure budget surpluses and debt reduction before tax cuts. The book examines his approach to the issues that continue to trouble American politics today, including questions about the scale and scope of the federal government.

This Civil War sourcebook organizes the crucial details of the war in an inventive format designed to enhance the reader's knowledge base and big-picture understanding of key events and outcomes. The war's causes, political and economic issues, important personalities, campaigns and battles are examined. Nearly 200 reader challenges stimulate reviews of critical moments, with suggested further reading. Photographs and maps have been carefully selected to supplement the topic being explored.

Between the years of 1886 and 1939, the world saw the first automobiles, rapid urbanization, the decay of empires, vast economic inequality, the first airplanes and the terrifying secrets of the atom. It was a time of cataclysmic cultural and technological transformation, and spawned the rise of the literary genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. This work assembles gems of late nineteenth and early twentieth century genre literature, including stories by such literary giants as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore, A. Merritt and E. M. Forster, as well as smaller authors like Clare Winger Harris, Marie Corelli, William Hope Hodgson and others. An array of incisive nonfiction pieces on cultural and scientific advances of the time period provides a context for the anthology's stories.

This work is a detailed portrait of one of the most important, bustling and absurd industries that cinema has ever known: colorful essays and nine career-spanning interviews with Italian genre directors of the 1970s, such as Luigi Cozzi, Francesco Barilli, Lamberto Bava and more. The directors reflect on their successes, failures and experiences directing films in the Italian westerns, sci-fi and horror genres. Following the anecdotes, gossip and controversies of the industry, the essays employ critical analyses to fully unveil the Italian genre cinema, as well as its impact on films across the world.

This book depicts the life of Conrad Veidt (1893-1943), the defining German actor of Expressionist cinema in the 1920s. His legendary performance in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1919/20) earned him the epithet "Demon of the Screen" and made Veidt an international star. To this day, Veidt is considered an icon of early horror film. He showed his acting range in more than a hundred films, among them masterpieces such as The Indian Tomb (1921), Orlac's Hands (1924), The Man Who Laughs (1928), The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and Casablanca (1942). Conrad Veidt used his acting career to become socially and politically involved, starting with the film Anders als die Anderen, the first film to advocate homosexual rights, in 1919. After the Nazis came to power, he left Germany to protest anti-Semitism and Nazi rule. Along with his biography, this book provides insights into the development of filmmaking from its beginnings through the 1940s, an epoch of cinematic art marked by technical innovations like sound and color film and by world-shaking events, including two world wars.

Billboard magazine named The Beatles the greatest performing musical act of all time, and their albums continue to chart to this day. This is no surprise to the author, who combed through nearly 60 years of the magazine, week by week, to compile a list of every song and album that charted. The end result is an intriguing look at the band's influence, including their solo efforts. The author assigns points to the positions of songs and albums on the charts in order to create a list ranging from the least successful to the most successful. Each entry includes a picture of the album cover or single sleeve, along with an analysis of the song or album. Also provided are introductory chapters about the Beatles and an explanation of how the Billboard charts have been tabulated and changed over the years.

How does analyzing video games as hypertexts expand the landscape of research for video game rhetoricians and games studies scholars? This is the first book to focus on how hypertext rhetoric impacts the five canons of rhetoric, and to apply that hypertext rhetoric to the study of video games. It also explores how ludonarrative agency is seized by players seeking to express themselves in ways that game makers did not necessarily intend when making the games that players around the world enjoy. This book takes inspiration from The Legend of Zelda, a series which players all over the world have spent decades deconstructing through online playthroughs, speedruns, and glitch hunts. Through these playthroughs, players demonstrate their ability to craft their own agency, independent of the objectives built by the makers of these games, creating new rhetorical situations worthy of analysis and consideration.

Since its debut in 1993, Magic: The Gathering has grown to be an influential collectible card game, allowing its community of loyal fans to duel each other while enjoying its lore and compelling narratives. This collection of essays focuses on Magic from a variety of disciplinary approaches. Authors explore the innovative game design of Magic, the ludic differences between analog and digital play, how players interact with the MTG market and one another, professional play versus casual play and the many ways Magic has impacted gaming.

The stories of Southern brigadier generals during the Revolutionary War remain largely forgotten or untold, but their experiences were unique. During the war, 13 of the 58 brigadier generals (the lowest-ranking generals) who served under George Washington died because of combat wounds or under British captivity. Seven of those 13 hailed from the southernmost and (excepting Virginia) less populated colonies. Proportionally, they were more likely to become casualties or prisoners than were their Northern counterparts, and they were far more likely than were the more senior major generals (only one of whom died during the war, out of 28 total officers). This book profiles the 18 Southern brigadier generals and their service during the American Revolution. It makes the case that Washington and his brigadier generals, especially the Southern brigadiers, won the war in spite of the major generals, many of whom exhibited cowardice, alcoholism, insubordination, womanizing, or ineffective leadership; more than half of the major generals were effectively cashiered or voluntarily left military service long before Yorktown and the war's conclusion. The author demonstrates that, as much as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and other politicians, the war's brigadier generals should be viewed as founding fathers, too.

Tony Gwynn spent his entire professional baseball career with the San Diego Padres. He stands second only to Ty Cobb in batting titles and consecutive .300-plus seasons. As a coach, he preached the Gwynn gospel to his players: do it right, do it with class, and respect others and the game. An extrovert with an unforgettable laugh and wry sense of humor, he was often the center of attention. Yet during off-seasons he retreated to Indianapolis to avoid the glare of publicity. He overcame disparities in his personality with an intense focus on preparation and commitment to professionalism, and frequently contributed to community projects. This first full-length biography traces the remarkable career of a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Written by a fan, about the fans, and for the fans, this book is about Beatles fandom and excitement for the band as it continues, undiminished, in the 21st century. The author conducted nearly 100 interviews with superfans across the globe, gathering stories that explain their enthusiasm. Readers will meet fans who met and married at Beatlesweek in Liverpool; those who had the chance to go onstage with Paul McCartney, got his autograph on some unusual places on their bodies, and had the signature permanently tattooed; and first-generation fans who saw the Beatles live and remember every detail as if it was yesterday. Noteworthy interviewees include Wings guitarist Laurence Juber; Mark Featherstone-Witty, cofounder of Paul McCartney's Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts; Bill Heckle, director of the Cavern Club and Magical Mystery Tour Bus in Liverpool; and music publisher David Stark, who now stands by Paul's side at LIPA graduations but started as a good-natured teenage fan who had the guts to ring Ringo's doorbell and meet him at his house. (The book also takes a deep dive into Beatles-related TV shows, Broadway musicals, movies, businesses, Sirius XM DJs, tribute bands and more.)

Raul Villamia's childhood in Cuba revolved around baseball and bloodshed. The violence that he witnessed led him to support Castro's revolution, and his brother Mario introduced him to Castro's 26th of July Movement (M267). Minor league baseball brought him to the United States, where he hoped to pursue a career in the majors, and left Villamia uniquely placed to aid Castro's revolution from abroad. From Tampa, New York City, Bridgeport, Union City, Miami, and Key West, the Villamias, Angel Perez-Vidal, Howard K. Davis and others supported Castro through fundraising, collecting supplies for the revolutionaries, propaganda campaigns, and arms smuggling. Raul rubbed elbows with Castro and his top men and with American gangsters who did business in Cuba. He was hounded by the FBI, and his brother Mario is mentioned in the Warren Commission Report. This memoir recalls Villamia's experience as an advocate for Castro in the United States and tells the story of those in America whose efforts helped to oust Batista.

The 1982 St. Louis Cardinals played an entertaining style of baseball built on speed and defense. The roster was constructed and piloted by Whitey Herzog, a baseball visionary who tailored his team for the AstroTurf and spacious dimensions of Busch Stadium. Herzog traded for closer Bruce Sutter, speedsters Lonnie Smith and Willie McGee, and defensive wizard Ozzie Smith, adding to a talented roster that included the likes of Bob Forsch, Keith Hernandez, and George Hendrick. The result was an exhilarating season filled with winning streaks, numerous obstacles, and one unforgettable steal of home. The Cardinals won the National League pennant despite hitting the fewest home runs in the major leagues, then overcame baseball's most powerful team--the Milwaukee Brewers--in the World Series. This exhaustive account chronicles the Cardinals from Herzog's rebuild to the final out of the Fall Classic. Hundreds of sources, including original interviews, were compiled to revisit a championship season and tell the backstories of an eclectic group of players who reached baseball's pinnacle.

For the reader interested in learning more about working in sports--or the fan that wants a look at what those inside the radio booth go through day-to-day--this book contains the secrets and successes of minor league baseball broadcasters with a combined century of experience telling the story of America's pastime. A host of decorated industry veterans discuss their careers, sharing tales of baseball greats from before they were famous, players who didn't make it past Class-A, the zaniest promotional exercises to hit the market, some of small-town America's greatest cuisine, the highs of winning a championship and the lows of being stranded on the highway for hours.

Errett Lujan served during World War II with the U.S. Army 200th/515th Coast Artillery (Anti-aircraft) Regiment in the Philippines, the largest regiment on the islands when the Japanese invaded just hours after Pearl Harbor. The regiment was credited as both the first and the last to fire on the enemy before surrendering. Lujan survived the invasion, the Bataan Death March and more than three years in POW camps. After the war, he said little to his family about his harrowing experiences. Written by his daughter, this lovingly researched narrative pieces together the story of his service and his imprisonment, drawing on Lujan's diaries and letters, and original interviews with 200th/515th survivors and former POWs.

Greatly expanded and updated from the 1977 original, this new edition explores the evolution of the modern horror film, particularly as it reflects anxieties associated with the atomic bomb, the Cold War, 1960s violence, sexual liberation, the Reagan revolution, 9/11 and the Iraq War. It divides modern horror into three varieties (psychological, demonic and apocalyptic) and demonstrates how horror cinema represents the popular expression of everyday fears while revealing the forces that influence American ideological and political values. Directors given a close reading include Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, David Cronenberg, Guillermo Del Toro, Michael Haneke, Robert Aldrich, Mel Gibson and George A. Romero. Additional material discusses postmodern remakes, horror franchises and Asian millennial horror. This book also contains more than 950 frame grabs and a very extensive filmography.

The persona of Edward de Vere represents a contrast to the canonical, Stratfordian image of Shakespeare. His adulterous affair with a teenage girl half his age, his complicity in acts of treason against Queen Elizabeth, and the bankruptcy of his earldom due to his lavish spending all combine to paint a picture of a man contrary to the Stratfordian ideal. However, it is this unattractive portrayal of him that supports the argument that de Vere wrote the sonnets, since the sonnets themselves offer up underlying messages of ridicule, deception, avarice, and sexual obsession that doggedly champion the author's own best interests above others. This work presents an Oxfordian reading of the sonnets and the problematic life of Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.