A humorous illustrated gift book with history's biggest fails hailing from politics, pop culture, international relations, business, sports, and more. From skinny-dipping Presidents to toxic tooth fillings to singing pop stars who can't carry a tune, 100 of the Worst Ideas in History is a celebration of humanity's historical—and often hysterical—missteps that have started wars, sunk countries, wrecked companies, scuttled careers, lost millions of dollars, and even endangered the Earth. Interesting stories from history include: How a confused chauffeur helped start World War I Who turned down the greatest product placement opportunity in Hollywood history How a Chicago White Sox game helped hasten the demise of disco The toad that nearly ate Australia The most dangerous children's game ever invented Spanning politics, pop culture, fashion, sports, technology, and more, this irreverent and witty book is packed with fun photos and sidebars, tracing how these thundering brainstorms turned into blundering brain farts—and the astonishing impacts our faux pas and foibles still have on us today. Great for gifting! Funny Father's Day gift White elephant gag gift Unique gift for the history major Fun teacher gift

Study of the Cold War all too often shows us the war that wasn’t fought. The reality, of course, is that many “hot” conflicts did occur, some with the great powers' weapons and approval, others without. It is this reality, and this period of quasi-war and semiconflict, that Jonathan M. House plumbs in A Military History of the Cold War, 1962–1991, a complex case study in the Clausewitzian relationship between policy and military force during a time of global upheaval and political realignment. This volume opens a new perspective on three fraught decades of Cold War history, revealing how the realities of time, distance, resources, and military culture often constrained and diverted the inclinations or policies of world leaders. In addition to the Vietnam War and nuclear confrontations between the USSR and the United States, this period saw dozens of regional wars and insurgencies fought throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Cuba, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, Egypt, and South Africa pursued their own goals in ways that drew the superpowers into regional disputes. Even clashes ostensibly unrelated to the politics of East-West confrontation, such as the Nigerian-Biafran conflict, the Falklands/Malvinas War, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, involved armed forces, weapons, and tactics developed for the larger conflict and thus come under House’s scrutiny. His study also takes up nontraditional or specialized aspects of the period, including weapons of mass destruction, civil-military relations, civil defense, and control of domestic disorders. The result is a single, integrated survey and analysis of a complex period in geopolitical history, which fills a significant gap in our knowledge of the organization, logistics, operations, and tactics involved in conflict throughout the Cold War.

This book is a collection of essays written by the very scientists and engineers who have led, and continue to lead, the scientific quest known as SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Divided into three parts, the first section, ‘The Spirit of SETI Past’, written by the surviving pioneers of this then emerging discipline, reviews the major projects undertaken during the first 50 years of SETI science and the results of that research. In the second section, ‘The Spirit of SETI Present’, the present-day science and technology is discussed in detail, providing the technical background to contemporary SETI instruments, experiments, and analytical techniques, including the processing of the received signals to extract potential alien communications. In the third and final section, ‘The Spirit of SETI Future’, the book looks ahead to the possible directions that SETI will take in the next 50 years, addressing such important topics as interstellar message construction, the risks and assumptions of interstellar communications, when we might make contact, what aliens might look like and what is likely to happen in the aftermath of such a contact.

This book emphasizes humans interacting and participating in making meaning with multimodal resources and relating experience via intermedial means. The contributors explore diverse ways of mediating work, education, arts, and culture, and ask how interactive participation involves experiences of the north either as a physical setting or a more abstract cultural condition that shapes the activity. The ten chapters engage with topical theoretical debate and put novel methodology to test, providing essential reading for scholars and students in this rich and rapidly developing global field of research.

Since the shocking news first broke in 1876 of the Seventh Cavalry’s disastrous defeat at the Little Big Horn, fascination with the battle—and with Lieutenant George Armstrong Custer—has never ceased. Widespread interest in the subject has spawned a vast outpouring of literature, which only increases with time. This two-volume bibliography of Custer literature is the first to be published in some twenty-five years and the most complete ever assembled. Drawing on years of research, Michael O’Keefe has compiled entries for roughly 3,000 books and 7,000 articles and pamphlets. Covering both nonfiction and fiction (but not juvenile literature), the bibliography focuses on events beginning with Custer’s tenure at West Point during the 1850s and ending with the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. Included within this span are Custer’s experiences in the Civil War and in Texas, the 1873 Yellowstone and 1874 Black Hills expeditions, the Great Sioux War of 1876–77, and the Seventh Cavalry’s pursuit of the Nez Perces in 1877. The literature on Custer, the Battle of the Little Big Horn, and the Seventh Cavalry touches the entire American saga of exploration, conflict, and settlement in the West, including virtually all Plains Indian tribes, the frontier army, railroading, mining, and trading. Hence this bibliography will be a valuable resource for a broad audience of historians, librarians, collectors, and Custer enthusiasts.

Conventional wisdom claims that the world is going broke, and that we must tighten our belts and accept poverty as the new normal. In a direct challenge to this view, Kimon Valaskakis, Professor of Economics, Futurist and former Canadian Ambassador to the OECD, claims the very opposite. Never in the history of civilization has Humanity been as rich as today. With an 70 trillion in world economic output for only 7 billion inhabitants of Planet Earth, there is a potential annual income of $10,000 per person. Instead, what we see is the juxtaposition of what he calls Buffets and Breadlines. A small percentage of the world population enjoys all-you-can-waste economic buffets, while the rest may be increasingly condemned to 1930s style breadlines. This gross mismanagement of the earths resources masquerades as scarcity, which is then used to justify harsh austerity policies hurting everyone except the very rich. If the analysis of this first book is indeed valid, much of present public policy is doomed to fail and bound to lead to counter-productive results for the world economy. Couched in a new, yet old, genre of a philosophic play, emulating the Socratic dialogues , this book, part of a trilogy, depicts the deliberations of two dozen fictional characters who meet in Corfu, to change the world in three weeks. The first book chronicles the findings of their first week, in colorful and dialectal style, with opposing ideas and opinions expressed, though in the friendly conviviality of a beautiful beach resort. The second and third books, which have yet to be published, will identify desirable alternatives to the status quo, and ultimately how do we get from here to there.

Reveals the experience of reading in many cultures and across the agesShows the experiences of ordinary readers in Scotland, Australasia, Russia, and ChinaExplores how digital media has transformed literary criticismPortrays everyday reading in art Includes reading across national and cultural linesCommon Readers casts a fascinating light on the literary experiences of ordinary people: miners in Scotland, churchgoers in Victorian London, workers in Czarist Russia, schoolgirls in rural Australia, farmers in Republican China, and forward to today's online book discussion groups. Chapters in this volume explore what they read, and how books changed their lives.

The movement toward greater openness represents a change of philosophy, ethos, and government and a set of interrelated and complex changes that transform markets altering the modes of production and consumption, ushering in a new era based on the values of openness: an ethic of sharing and peer-to-peer collaboration enabled through new architectures of participation. These changes indicate a broader shift from the underlying industrial mode of production—a “productionist” metaphysics—to a postindustrial mode of consumption as use, reuse, and modification where new logics of social media structure different patterns of cultural consumption and symbolic analysis becomes a habitual and daily creative activity. The economics of openness constructs a new language of “presuming” and “produsage” in order to capture the open participation, collective co-creativity, communal evaluation, and commons-based production of social and public goods. Information is the vital element in the “new” politics and economy that links space, knowledge, and capital in networked practices and freedom is the essential ingredient in this equation if these network practices are to develop or transform themselves into 'knowledge cultures'. The Virtues of Openness investigates the social processes and policies that foster openness as an overriding educational value evidenced in the growth of open source, open access, and open education and their convergences that characterize global knowledge communities. The book argues that openness seems also to suggest political transparency and the norms of open inquiry, indeed, even democracy itself as both the basis of the logic of inquiry and the dissemination of its results. The Virtues of Openness examines the complex history of the concept of the open society before beginning a systematic investigation of openness in relation to the book, the “open text” and the written word. These changes are discussed in relation to the development of new open spaces of scholarship with their impact upon open journal systems, open peer review, open science, and the open global digital economy.