Smithsonian Books (DC)

When first published in 1971, Amazonia was a pioneering contribution to the emerging field of cultural ecology. Betty Meggers argued that the Amazon's luxurious vegetation concealed significant...

In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of...

Airpower is credited with success in Afghanistan, Desert Storm, and Serbia, but in Vietnam all of America's aerial might could not defeat a vastly outnumbered Third World force on bicycles. With a...

They flew low and slow, at treetop level, at night, in monsoons, and in point-blank range of enemy guns and missiles. They were missions no one else wanted, but the ones all other pilots prayed for...

The year 2002 marked the 100th anniversary of the first installation of air-conditioning. During the past century, it has become a staple of American life; 83% of US homes are now air-conditioned. In...

Counting the Days is the story of six prisoners of war imprisoned by both sides during the conflict the Japanese called the "Pacific War." As in all wars, the prisoners were civilians as well as...

Award-winning geneticist John C. Avise guides this delightful voyage around the planet in search of answers to nature's mysteries. He demonstrates how scientists directly examine DNA to address...

The great apes -- gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and orangutans -- are known to be our closest living relatives. Chimpanzees in particular share 98 percent of our DNA, and scientists widely agree...

When Congress declared war in April 1917, the Europeans had already deployed their third generation of fighters, equipped with machine guns and capable of speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour,...

Focusing on peoples throughout the tropical world, and including case studies from Cuba, Ethiopia, Ghana, Venezuela, and Vietnam, Home Gardens and Agrobiodiversity explains how both rural and urban...

In this brilliant study, Elizabeth White Nelson challenges a central tenet of 19th-century American history: namely, that men and women lived in separate spheres. Women, supposedly, lived lives...

This little known classic history of flight-testing the Xplanes is reborn, sweepingly revised and updated with new and recently released information. Aviation enthusiasts will savor the most detailed...

In his sensitive portrayal of the Raramuri (or Tarahumara) Indians, Merrill examines the ways in which a society, lacking formal educational institutions, produces and transmits its basic knowledge...

Drawing on both their own fieldwork from 1991 to 1999 and older written sources, Stewart and Strathern explore how the Duna have remade their rituals and associated myths in response to the outside...

On April 5, 1945, more than sixty black officers of the U.S. Army Air Forces were arrested for entering a whites-only club at Freeman Field, Indiana, to protest the rigid segregation and unequal...

Mapping the boundaries between ancient societies through studies of "ethnicity," migration, or economic systems is of perennial interest to archaeologists, who typically have taken two divergent...

The Enterprise of Flight is a highly praised contribution to the literature on American aviation and space exploration history. In a new introduction for this paperback edition, Roger E. Bilstein...

Conventional assumptions hold that U.S. government research and development efforts produced the satellite communications industry. David J. Whalen has looked deeply into the history of the industry...

After nearly eighteen months of the largely unsuccessful bombing campaign called Operation Rolling Thunder, the US Air Force began to look for ways to overcome technological, geographical, and...

At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all...

In the summer of 1947 something mysterious crashed in the New Mexican desert near the town of Roswell. Whether it was an alien spacecraft manned by tiny humanlike beings or--the US government's...