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"The definitive biography of Chuck Berry, legendary performer and inventor of rock and roll and author of classics like 'Johnny B. Goode,' 'Maybellene,' 'You Never Can Tell,' and 'Roll Over Beethoven.' Chuck Berry long ago earned a reputation as a person who gave nothing away. He could be a difficult man to be around off-stage, and was extremely closed off in interviews. There was the work, and then there was the man, who was not easily given to describing...
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Over the course of the 20th century, unionization and innovation totally reshaped the centuries-old maritime shipping industry. Beginning with a rich portrayal of life as a longshoreman in the early 1900s, this program chronicles organized labor's long-fought battles for respect and good wages-gains ultimately stripped of their meaning by the introduction of a whole new way of moving cargoes between land and sea: the container. The intertwined biographies...
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He introduced the lowly peanut to big business and changed the course of Southern agriculture. He turned soybeans into plastic and carved his place in history as one of the 20th century's greatest scientists. George Washington Carver was a slave set free with a microscope and a vision: this is his story.
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The story of jazz begins in New Orleans, 19th-century America's most cosmopolitan city. Here, in the 1890s, African-American artists created a new music out of ragtime syncopations, Caribbean rhythms, marching band instrumentation, and the soulful feeling of the blues. This program introduces the pioneers of this revolutionary art form: half-mad cornet player Buddy Bolden, pianist Jelly Roll Morton, clarinet prodigy Sidney Bechet, trumpet virtuoso...
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In vibrant historical detail, American Eclipse animates the fierce jockeying that came to dominate late nineteenth-century American astronomy, revealing the challenges faced by three of the most determined eclipse chasers who participated in this adventure. James Craig Watson, in his day a renowned asteroid hunter; Vassar astronomer Maria Mitchell, who fought to demonstrate that science and higher learning were not anathema to femininity; and Thomas...
14) 12 seconds of silence: how a team of inventors, tinkerers, and spies took down a Nazi superweapon
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"Tells the story of the American scientists, tinkerers, and nerds who solved one of the biggest puzzles of World WarII-and developed one of the most powerful weapons of the war"--Provided by publisher.
15) Henry Ford
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Henry Ford paints a fascinating portrait of a farm boy who rose from obscurity to become the most influential American innovator of the 20th century. Ford's Model T automobile and his five-dollar-a-day wage ushered in the modern world, earning Ford reverence from millions of Americans. Yet many of the changes he wrought deeply troubled the car maker. In frustration, he lashed out at enemies, real and imagined.
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"With a gift for visionary fiction that 'would make Robert A. Heinlein proud' (Entertainment Weekly), three-time Hugo Award-winning author Allen Steele now imagines an alternate history rooted in an actual historical possibility: What if the race to space had occurred in the early days of World War II? It's 1941, and Wernher von Braun is ordered by his fuhrer to abandon the V-2 rocket and turn German resources in a daring new direction: construction...
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Filled with broken hearts and black ravens, Edgar Allan Poe's ghastly tales have delighted readers for centuries. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age two. He was soon adopted by a Virginia family who worked as tombstone merchants. In 1827 he enlisted in the Army and subsequently failed out of West Point. His first published story, The Raven, was a huge success, but his joy was overshadowed by the death of his wife. Poe devoted his life...
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"America stands at a dramatic crossroads: Massive banks and corporations wield disturbing power. The huge income gap between the 1% and the other 99% grows visibly wider. Astounding new technologies are changing American lives. Conflicts over U.S. military interventionism, the environment, and immigration dominate public debate. Sound familiar? You might be surprised to know that these headlines were ripped, not from today's newspaper, but from...