Two generations ago, young men and women with only a high-school degree would have entered the plentiful industrial occupations which then sustained the middle-class ideal of a male-breadwinner family. Such jobs have all but vanished over the past forty years, and in their absence ever-growing numbers of young adults now hold precarious, low-paid jobs with few fringe benefits. ...(展开全部)

"This is scientific storytelling at its most visceral, striding with the beasts through their Triassic dawn, Jurassic dominance, and abrupt demise in the Cretaceous." — Nature The dinosaurs. Sixty-six million years ago, the Earth’s most fearsome creatures vanished. Today they remain one of our planet’s great mysteries. Now The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs reveals their extrao...(展开全部)

This new and exciting publication from seasoned historian and author Bryan Perrett charts the ups and downs of the German army from the days of Frederick the Great to the dying days of World War Two. It passes through the Napoleonic period, takes in the growth of war machinery under the leadership of Clausewitz and Moltke and acquaints the reader with the various victories won ...(展开全部)

At the turn of the twentieth century, soybeans grew on so little of America’s land that nobody bothered to track the total. By the year 2000, they covered upward of 70 million acres, second only to corn, and had become the nation’s largest cash crop. How this little-known Chinese transplant, initially grown chiefly for forage, turned into a ubiquitous component of American farm...(展开全部)

This book puts forward a different approach to language change, the punctuated equilibrium model. This is based on the premise that during most of the 100,000 or more years that humans have had language, states of equilibrium have existed during which linguistic features diffused across the languages in a given area so that they gradually converged on a common prototype. From t...(展开全部)

An up-to-the-minute account of the long history and remarkable biology of the extraordinary animals that capture the imagination of every child. The dinosaurs are much more varied than the popular picture of lumbering giants and matching meat eaters. Steve Brusatte expertly leads the reader through the latest discoveries to unravel their great range of lifestyles in a vanished ...(展开全部)

Men in hardhats were once the heart of America’s working class; now it is women in scrubs. What does this shift portend for our future? Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy—particularly health car...(展开全部)

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel, but today most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America’s cities have weathered new economic realities....(展开全部)