Focusing on one of the last untold chapters in the history of human flight, Dictatorship of the Air is the first book to explain the true story behind twentieth-century Russia s quest for aviation prominence. Based on nearly a decade of scholarly research, but written with general readers in mind, this is the only account to answer the question What is Russian about Russian aviation? From the 1909 arrival of machine-powered flight in the land of the tsars to the USSR s victory over Hitler in 1945, Dictatorship of the Air describes why the airplane became the preeminent symbol of industrial...

Focusing on one of the last untold chapters in the history of human flight, Dictatorship of the Air is the first book to explain the true story behind twentieth-century Russia s quest for aviation prominence. Based on nearly a decade of scholarly research, but written with general readers in mind, this is the only account to answer the question What is Russian about Russian aviation? From the 1909 arrival of machine-powered flight in the land of the tsars to the USSR s victory over Hitler in 1945, Dictatorship of the Air describes why the airplane became the preeminent symbol of industrial...

Missiles for the Fatherland tells the story of the scientists and engineers who built the V-2 missile in Hitler s Germany. This is the first scholarly history of the culture and society that underpinned missile development at Germany s secret missile base at Peenemunde. Using mainly primary source documents and publicly available oral history interviews, Michael Petersen examines the lives of the men and women who worked at Peenemunde and later at the underground slave labor complex called Mittelbau-Dora, where concentration camp prisoners mass-produced the V-2. His research reveals a complex...

The Red Rockets Glare is the first academic study on the birth of the Soviet space program and one of the first social histories of Soviet science. Based on many years of archival research, the book situates the birth of cosmic enthusiasm within the social and cultural upheavals of Russian and Soviet history. Asif A. Siddiqi frames the origins of Sputnik by bridging imagination with engineering seeing them not as dialectic, discrete, and sequential but as mutable, intertwined, and concurrent. Imagination and engineering not only fed each other but were also co-produced by key actors who...

This book explores a technology that transformed airplanes into safe, practical tools of war and a means of transportation during the first half of the twentieth century.

Examines the historical development of the conceptual design process of the airplane through six case studies.