"This book insists that history matters. What if current divisions in America rest, in part, on a fundamental divergence in the understanding of our history? The book proposes the three most prominent Christian curricula have played a role through the historical narrative promoted for almost fifty years, becoming more widespread in different forms of alternative schooling from Christian schools to voucher programs, and homeschooling. Their narrative has been significant in defining Americans' understanding of the world and its history and exposes the efficacy of the alliance between certain religious interests, conservative legislators and school boards, and various corporate interests in reshaping education in the United States. The campaign for a "Christian right history" is analogous to the successful advocacy for "intelligent design" in public school science curricula. Many conservative institutions support both the inclusion of politically conservative and Christian content into school curricula"--

The true stroy of the longest-distance hijacking in American history. In an America torn apart by the Vietnam War and the demise of '60s idealism, airplane hijackings were astonishingly routine. Over a five-year period starting in 1968, the desperate and disillusioned seized commercial jets nearly once a week, using guns, bombs, and jars of acid. Some hijackers wished to escape to foreign lands; others aimed to swap hostages for sacks of cash. Their criminal exploits mesmerized the country, never more so than when shattered Army veteran Roger Holder and mischievous party girl Cathy Kerkow managred to comandeer Western Airlines Flight 701 and flee across an ocean with a half-million dollars in ransom—a heist that remains the longest-distance hijacking in American history. More than just an enthralling story about a spectacular crime and its bittersweet, decades-long aftermath, The Skies Belong to Us is also a psychological portrait of America at its most turbulent and a testament to the madness that can grip a nation when politics fail.

How Bush's war commandeered history and exploited the anxieties of post-industrial America.

Aviation security expert Philip Baum delves into the archives to reveal the stories behind the most astonishing and shocking crimes in aviation history, calling on real-life testimonies from hijackers, crew members, passengers and politicians. The human stories behind the criminal attacks that have plagued aviation since 1911 are detailed in this authoritative and thrilling account of aviation security history, from the legendary hijacks by left-wing and Palestinian groups of the twentieth century, to the more recent suicide attacks carried out by fundamentalists and the psychologically disturbed.

Why are the economic interests and priorities of lower- and middle-class Americans so often ignored by the U.S. Congress, while the economic interests of the wealthiest are prioritized, often resulting in policies favorable to their interests? In Hijacking the Agenda, political scientists Christopher Witko, Jana Morgan, Nathan J. Kelly, and Peter K. Enns examine why Congress privileges the concerns of businesses and the wealthy over those of average Americans. They go beyond demonstrating that such economic bias exists to illuminate precisely how and why economic policy is so often skewed in favor of the rich. The authors analyze over 20 years of floor speeches by several hundred members of Congress to examine the influence of campaign contributions on how the national economic agenda is set in Congress. They find that legislators who received more money from business and professional associations were more likely to discuss the deficit and other upper-class priorities, while those who received more money from unions were more likely to discuss issues important to lower- and middle-class constituents, such as economic inequality and wages. This attention imbalance matters because issues discussed in Congress receive more direct legislative action, such as bill introductions and committee hearings. While unions use campaign contributions to push back against wealthy interests, spending by the wealthy dwarfs that of unions. The authors use case studies analyzing financial regulation and the minimum wage to demonstrate how the financial influence of the wealthy enables them to advance their economic agenda. In each case, the authors examine the balance of structural power, or the power that comes from a person or company’s position in the economy, and kinetic power, the power that comes from the ability to mobilize organizational and financial resources in the policy process. The authors show how big business uses its structural power and resources to effect policy change in Congress, as when the financial industry sought deregulation in the late 1990s, resulting in the passage of a bill eviscerating New Deal financial regulations. Likewise, when business interests want to preserve the policy status quo, it uses its power to keep issues off of the agenda, as when inflation eats into the minimum wage and its declining purchasing power leaves low-wage workers in poverty. Although groups representing lower- and middle-class interests, particularly unions, can use their resources to shape policy responses if conditions are right, they lack structural power and suffer significant resource disadvantages. As a result, wealthy interests have the upper hand in shaping the policy process, simply due to their pivotal position in the economy and the resulting perception that policies beneficial to business are beneficial for everyone. Hijacking the Agenda is an illuminating account of the way economic power operates through the congressional agenda and policy process to privilege the interests of the wealthy and marks a major step forward in our understanding of the politics of inequality.

The unbelievable true story of three pilots flying a routine Federal Express flight who must call on their inner courage, strength, and ability to stop a bitter, suicidal hijacker from killing them, and thousands of people below. David Sanders, Jim Tucker, and Andy Peterson had taken off on a regular “out-and-back,” delivering and picking up packages for FedEx’s next-day service. They had one jumpseat passenger, an off-duty colleague who they assumed was simply taking advantage of the FedEx perk allowing virtually all employees to ride the company jets for free. The shock came twenty minutes later. Before the plane had reached its normal cruising altitude, the lone passenger attacked the pilots with hammers and a spear gun. He’d had his diabolical plan in the works for months: by crashing the plane into the Federal Express Memphis hub, he’d ruin the company, which he felt had treated him unfairly. With superhuman strength fueled by sheer fury, the attacker struck the pilots again and again. What he didn’t count on was the skill and intelligence of the pilots. While Sanders and Peterson tried to stop the relentless battering, copilot Tucker swung the aircraft into dangerous flight maneuvers in an attempt to literally knock the man off his feet. In Hijacked, Dave Hirschman vividly re-creates this hair-raising battle of wills, giving each pilot’s point of view and drawing on his own experiences as a pilot to take us inside that fateful day.

The teaching of history has long been the subject of partisan warfare. Religion often plays a prominent role in these debates, as secular progressives and conservative Christians disagree over which historical figures are worthy of study, how (or whether) certain events should be portrayed, and ultimately how tax dollars should be spent. But what about students who are educated outside the public schools, either in religious schools or at home? How are they learning history, and what effect does that have on our democracy? Hijacking History analyzes the high school world history textbooks produced by the three most influential publishers of Christian educational materials. In these books, the historian, informed by his faith, tells the allegedly unbiased story of God's actions as interpreted through the Bible. History becomes a weapon to judge and condemn civilizations that do not accept the true God or adopt "biblical" positions. In their treatment of the modern world, these texts identify ungodly ideas to be vanquished-evolution, humanism, biblical modernism, socialism, and climate science among them. The judgments found in these textbooks, Kathleen Wellman shows, are rooted in the history of American evangelicals and fundamentalists and the battles they fought against the tide of secularism. In assuming that God sanctions fundamentalist positions on social, political, and economic issues, students are led to believe that that the ultimate mission of America is to succeed as a nation that advances evangelical Christianity and capitalism throughout the world. The Christianity presented in these textbooks is proselytizing, intolerant of other religions and non-evangelical Christians, and unquestionably anchored to the political right. As Hijacking History argues, the ideas these textbooks promote have significant implications for contemporary debates about religion, politics, and education, and pose a direct challenge to the values of a pluralistic democracy.

Jackie Nink Pflug's gripping true story of her experience during the terrorist hijacking, and how she recuperated from this devastating trauma. " ... her memoir is an inspirational chronicle of personal tragedy surmounted by raw courage" - Publishers Weekly Jackie Nink Pflug's gripping true story of courage and inspiration, told from a survivor's perspective, with a new preface written by the author. Ms. Pflug, who was shot and thrown onto the tarmac during the hijacking of EgyptAir Flight 648, tells her story and the lessons learned as she recuperated from this devastating trauma.

In Hijacking History, Liane Tanguay unravels the ideology behind an American enterprise unprecedented in scope, ambition, and brazen claim to global supremacy: the War on Terror. She argues that the fears, anxieties, and even the hopes encoded in American popular culture account for the public's passive acceptance of the Bush administration's wars overseas and violation of many of the rights, privileges, and freedoms they claimed to defend. In her analysis, Tanguay critically examines the neoconservative contention that the current system of liberal-democratic capitalism represents the peak of human evolution - a claim that creates the impression of a "post-historical" age. Establishing a continuity between the "post-historical" imaginary and the attacks of 9/11, the book examines the links between shifting justifications for the war, renewed militarism, and capitalist globalization. Reviewing a wide range of media including Hollywood films, network television, and presidential rhetoric, Tanguay calls for a revival of politics in popular culture and rejects the politics of fear as disseminated by mass media. A timely retrospective on the War on Terror, Hijacking History examines popular representations of US military action and dissects both the logic and the aesthetics by which the dominant discourses strive to justify war, while revealing how some of those forces can ultimately contribute to an ideology of resistance.

On Sunday, September 6, 1970, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) hijacked four airliners bound from Europe for New York. One, a brand new Pan Am 747, was taken to Cairo and blown up only seconds after its passengers escaped. The attempt to hijack a second plane, an El Al flight, was foiled and the plane landed safely in the UK. Two other planes, one TWA and one Swissair, were directed to the desert floor thirty-five miles northeast of Amman, Jordan, where a twenty-five day hostage drama began. With the additional hijacking of a British airliner, over four hundred and fifty hostages had landed in the Jordanian desert. David Raab was on the TWA flight with his mother and siblings but was separated from them and taken to a refugee camp and then to an apartment in Amman where he was held hostage through a civil war. This is his story.