The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle for Amazon device.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and does not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at
https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
A Review from The New York Times
“Readable and at times even exciting” —The New York Times
Presidents Embattled by Drew Middleton, The New York Times, November 4, 1984
(Drew Middleton was the military correspondent of The New York Times.)
NEMESIS: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia. By Robert J. Donovan. Illustrated. 216 pp.
Robert J. Donovan tackled an awesome task in this analysis of two American Presidents’ actions and reactions to two of the most agonizing political-military crises ever to beset the Republic. The result is a closely reasoned, well-researched commentary on troubles that convulsed the United States for a quarter of a century.
Mr. Donovan has presented in alternate sections descriptions of the military and political events that cost more than 100,000 American lives and dominated American politics. The reader is asked to move from the Yalu River to the councils of the Democratic Party leadership, and from the jungles of South Vietnam to the groves of academe where opposition to the fighting in those jungles flourished. Mr. Donovan’s success in making the book readable and at times even exciting is a tribute to his skill. Inevitably longer, more detailed comparative analyses of these situations will be published one day. But until they appear, ”Nemesis” should serve as a standard.
Two themes run through it. The first is that neither Truman’s Administration nor Johnson’s anticipated the endless complications, domestic and foreign, that would arise from the deployment of United States forces on the Asian mainland. Governments, democratic or otherwise, seldom do understand the consequences of such actions.
The second theme, which I wish Mr. Donovan had explored more fully, is the impact of recent history on policy making. The decisions about Korea by President Truman and his cabinet were affected strongly by what today would be called the Munich syndrome – a bitter memory of the surrender by Great Britain and France to Hitler’s demands at the Munich meeting of 1938. Ironically, the capitulation at Munich was partly inspired by British and French leaders’ memories of the millions of their compatriots who were killed or wounded during World War I. But Truman saw any failure to respond to the North Koreans’ attack on South Korea in 1950 as another Munich.
That attitude continued to affect Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson in the form of the ”domino theory” when they considered what to do about the slow disintegration of Vietnam after the French were defeated there in the 1950’s. They believed that the loss of South Vietnam would lead to the falling of other ”dominoes” in Asia. And the result is that the United States now suffers in the conduct of international affairs from the inhibiting influence of our loss in Vietnam.
Mr. Donovan, a seasoned reporter on politics who has written a highly praised two-volume biography of Truman, excels in recounting the criticism that fell on Truman and Johnson during their war years. Still vivid in public memory is the wave of criticism of Johnson, the Vietnam War and, in many cases, the entire American political and social system that broke over the White House in the 1960’s. But many will have forgotten the storm of abuse that burst on the White House after the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur from his command in Korea, abuse that included demands for Truman’s impeachment.
Mr. Donovan pays perhaps too much attention to the political ramifications of the two wars and, in my view, not enough to the military events and decisions that aroused these political responses. For instance, I would have welcomed a more thorough examination of the refusal by the White House to recognize that North Vietnam and not the Viet Cong was the enemy in the Vietnam War, and to consider plans for early attacks on Haiphong and Hanoi. One reason heard at the time was that such bombing would invite intervention by China. But at the time China was caught up in the opening of the Cultural Revolution and many experts believe it would have been unable to intervene effectively.
Mr. Donovan’s discussion of the later American air attacks on North Vietnam is balanced and makes the point, too often dismissed at the time, that in that predominantly agricultural economy there was really nothing much to bomb save key communications. North Vietnam wasn’t Germany.
Effective surprise by the enemies marred the American military performance in both wars and these surprises had a great impact on American politics. The Chinese attack on MacArthur’s forces in North Korea led to a major American military defeat – all the more grievous for public opinion in this country because it closely followed the successful American landings at Inchon harbor in North Korea. About 300,000 Chinese fell on the American and South Korean forces and MacArthur, who had been talking about getting the boys home by Christmas, faced what he called an entirely new war.
POLITICALLY, the Tet offensive in 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War, as Mr. Donovan illustrates. Although, as we now know, eventually both the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were defeated with heavy casualties in this offensive, the raid on the United States Embassy in Saigon gave the impression that the United States was losing the war in military terms.
Truman emerges from these pages as by far the more balanced and effective war leader – one who, of course, knew something of war at first hand. Johnson, on the contrary, seems volatile and uncertain, a consummate politician who in the end failed to understand the impact of war on politics.
The Long Black Schooner: The Voyage of the Amistad
/0 Comments/in African-American History, Connecting Reading and Writing Assignments, For Young Adults, Free Ebooks /by Jim McCabeTo download an epub file for your Android tablet or Chromebook or computer or Apple device, use this button
To download a mobi file for your Amazon device, click here
Directions on how to email this file to your Kindle device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .
The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.
With the Calibre app, you and your students can read this ebook in epub format on computer screens. By changing the background color, and enlarging the font, the Calibre experience is reasonable. On Chromebooks you will need to use an ereading app which the Chromebook will provide when it sees the epub file.
Men, women, boys, girls—all are chained together on the slave ship Amistad. Only yesterday they were free in their beloved African villages. Then slave catchers kidnapped them, and are taking them in chains across the sea to be sold.
But Cinque, their leader, has an iron file….
On the night of June 30, 1839, the slaves cut their chains and take over the ship. Here is the true story of a breathtaking and little-known event in American history.
Here is what one reader had to say in a review on Amazon:
The book tells the story surrounding the Amistad. However, it is told in a way that is appealing to both youth and adults. The language is simple and the story is straightforward. There is no historical gobbly-gook here.
I found the book to be rather interesting, quite informative, and fairly easy to read (I read it in less than two days). It makes a great gift for any young history buff or anyone who is interesting in learning more about the Amistad but who hasn’t studied much history.
Nemesis: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia by Robert J. Donovan
/0 Comments/in Biographies, Free Ebooks, Korea, Military History, Vietnam /by Jim McCabeThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle for Amazon device.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and does not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
A Review from The New York Times
“Readable and at times even exciting” —The New York Times
Presidents Embattled by Drew Middleton, The New York Times, November 4, 1984
(Drew Middleton was the military correspondent of The New York Times.)
NEMESIS: Truman and Johnson in the Coils of War in Asia. By Robert J. Donovan. Illustrated. 216 pp.
Robert J. Donovan tackled an awesome task in this analysis of two American Presidents’ actions and reactions to two of the most agonizing political-military crises ever to beset the Republic. The result is a closely reasoned, well-researched commentary on troubles that convulsed the United States for a quarter of a century.
Mr. Donovan has presented in alternate sections descriptions of the military and political events that cost more than 100,000 American lives and dominated American politics. The reader is asked to move from the Yalu River to the councils of the Democratic Party leadership, and from the jungles of South Vietnam to the groves of academe where opposition to the fighting in those jungles flourished. Mr. Donovan’s success in making the book readable and at times even exciting is a tribute to his skill. Inevitably longer, more detailed comparative analyses of these situations will be published one day. But until they appear, ”Nemesis” should serve as a standard.
Two themes run through it. The first is that neither Truman’s Administration nor Johnson’s anticipated the endless complications, domestic and foreign, that would arise from the deployment of United States forces on the Asian mainland. Governments, democratic or otherwise, seldom do understand the consequences of such actions.
The second theme, which I wish Mr. Donovan had explored more fully, is the impact of recent history on policy making. The decisions about Korea by President Truman and his cabinet were affected strongly by what today would be called the Munich syndrome – a bitter memory of the surrender by Great Britain and France to Hitler’s demands at the Munich meeting of 1938. Ironically, the capitulation at Munich was partly inspired by British and French leaders’ memories of the millions of their compatriots who were killed or wounded during World War I. But Truman saw any failure to respond to the North Koreans’ attack on South Korea in 1950 as another Munich.
That attitude continued to affect Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson in the form of the ”domino theory” when they considered what to do about the slow disintegration of Vietnam after the French were defeated there in the 1950’s. They believed that the loss of South Vietnam would lead to the falling of other ”dominoes” in Asia. And the result is that the United States now suffers in the conduct of international affairs from the inhibiting influence of our loss in Vietnam.
Mr. Donovan, a seasoned reporter on politics who has written a highly praised two-volume biography of Truman, excels in recounting the criticism that fell on Truman and Johnson during their war years. Still vivid in public memory is the wave of criticism of Johnson, the Vietnam War and, in many cases, the entire American political and social system that broke over the White House in the 1960’s. But many will have forgotten the storm of abuse that burst on the White House after the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur from his command in Korea, abuse that included demands for Truman’s impeachment.
Mr. Donovan pays perhaps too much attention to the political ramifications of the two wars and, in my view, not enough to the military events and decisions that aroused these political responses. For instance, I would have welcomed a more thorough examination of the refusal by the White House to recognize that North Vietnam and not the Viet Cong was the enemy in the Vietnam War, and to consider plans for early attacks on Haiphong and Hanoi. One reason heard at the time was that such bombing would invite intervention by China. But at the time China was caught up in the opening of the Cultural Revolution and many experts believe it would have been unable to intervene effectively.
Mr. Donovan’s discussion of the later American air attacks on North Vietnam is balanced and makes the point, too often dismissed at the time, that in that predominantly agricultural economy there was really nothing much to bomb save key communications. North Vietnam wasn’t Germany.
Effective surprise by the enemies marred the American military performance in both wars and these surprises had a great impact on American politics. The Chinese attack on MacArthur’s forces in North Korea led to a major American military defeat – all the more grievous for public opinion in this country because it closely followed the successful American landings at Inchon harbor in North Korea. About 300,000 Chinese fell on the American and South Korean forces and MacArthur, who had been talking about getting the boys home by Christmas, faced what he called an entirely new war.
POLITICALLY, the Tet offensive in 1968 was the turning point of the Vietnam War, as Mr. Donovan illustrates. Although, as we now know, eventually both the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong were defeated with heavy casualties in this offensive, the raid on the United States Embassy in Saigon gave the impression that the United States was losing the war in military terms.
Truman emerges from these pages as by far the more balanced and effective war leader – one who, of course, knew something of war at first hand. Johnson, on the contrary, seems volatile and uncertain, a consummate politician who in the end failed to understand the impact of war on politics.
Labor’s New Millions by Mary Heaton Vorse
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Labor History /by Jim McCabeThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this website to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
Download mobi file here.
This is the story of how labor unions used sitdown strikes to force automakers and steelmakers into contracts that provided living wages for millions of American workers at the midcentury. The reading level is 9.1.
“How this young union whirled its membership from 30,000 to 400,000 in a year is one of labor’s greatest epics,” wrote Mary Heaton Vorse in Labor’s New Millions referring to the United Auto Workers. “In some places, wages increased from thirty and forty cents to one dollar an hour. Much had been done to set up healthier working conditions in the industry.” In Labor’s New Millions, Vorse explained how workers in the rubber plants, and steel mills and auto plants used sit-ins to force management to recognize their unions and then negotiate with the new unions. By the time of Labor’s New Millions, she had written about earlier labor struggles in national publications such as Harper’s and The Nation, and published novels and short stories about domestic relationships and family life. Her experience as a writer shows. Your students will see that she reported on the labor-management conflicts of mid-century with energy and enthusiasm. After the organizing of the 1930s and 1940s, one-third of American workers were union members in the 1950s. Today the number is 10%.
Vorse’s background as a writer is interesting. A historian wrote that it was a textile strike in Massachusetts that pushed Mary Heaton Vorse into writing about labor. “…Yet it was the 1912 textile workers’ strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, that she would name in her 1934 autobiography as the turning point. For the rest of her life, until her death in 1966 at the age of ninety-two, workers’ battles for fair treatment would be her primary focus. “We knew now where we belonged;” she wrote, “on the side of the workers, and not with the comfortable people among whom we were born.”
“The conditions in the mills at Lawrence are still shocking. At the turn of the century, workers, many of them teenagers, scraped by on two or three dollars a week, most of which went to paying their rent in overcrowded districts. Women were subject to routine sexual exploitation by their bosses, and death from accidents or lung diseases were everyday occurrences. Thirty-six out of every hundred men and women who worked the mills died before the age of twenty-five. In early 1912, the state attempted to enforce a law cutting the hours of the women and those under eighteen in the mills to fifty-four hours a week. In response, the mill owners cut everyone’s hours and their salaries, and were accused of speeding up output.” See more about Vorse’s life at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2019/11/25/feminize-your-canon-mary-heaton-vorse/
The Pullman Strike by Rev. William H. Carwardine
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Labor History, Primary Source /by Jim McCabeThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
Download mobi file here.
From Goodreads
During the heroic Pullman strike and boycott of 1894, a young Methodist minister defied the conventions of company-town self-censorship by writing this searing expose of the dictatorial and penny-pinching regime of multimillionaire George M. Pullman. That the Rev. Carwardine suffered immediate exile from his Pullman church suggests how deeply threatened the giant railroad manufacturing and operating company was by his plainly written book. Filled with appreciation for meaningful details of the everyday lives of diverse workers with common problems, and with a balanced admiration for the leadership of Eugene V Debs, The Pullman Strike vividly shows how a great experiment in industrial unionism like the American Railway Union could arise. Aware of the vast power and ruthlessness of the Pullman Company, Carwardine also suggests why the union was unable to prevail.
From the Back Cover of a Print Edition
Pullman was built as a company town on the edge of Chicago to turn out sleeping cars.
In the prettified tenements that fooled passing journalists, hungry workers crowded five families to a faucet. After severe wage cuts by the Pullman Company during the recession of 1893, the workers joined Gene Debs’ American Railway Union and struck. A Pullman preacher, the Rev. William Carwardine, spoke up on their behalf and detailed the conditions of their lives in this book of 1894. “Never did men have a cause more just,” he said “and never did corporation with equal pretenses grind men more unmercifully.”
Walter Reuther by Fred J. Cook
/0 Comments/in Biographies, Biography, For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, Labor History /by Jim McCabeThe epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices including Send-to-Kindle.
As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send-to-Kindle program. A great feature of the Send-to-Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send-to-Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
Download mobi file here.
When Walter Reuther spoke for labor, he spoke from a background of two generations in social reform and the labor movement, for his father and grandfather were leaders before him. As a boy, Walter grew up among the factories and mines of Wheeling, West Virginia. He became a diemaker and in 1927 went to Detroit, the Motor City. There the forces were beginning to work that were to create in the 1930’s the United Auto Workers and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Walter became an excellent tool and die maker. He and his brother Victor educated themselves to become labor leaders, first in Detroit, and then on a round-the-world tour. They worked in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and saw firsthand how Communism repressed the workers. The brothers felt the weight of Nazism and Fascism in Germany and Italy.
Back in Detroit, Walter Reuther found the auto workers’ demand for a union increasing because of the effects of the Depression. Unemployment, wage cuts, and tighter and tighter control of the workers’ lives led to sit-down strikes, riots, bloodshed, martial law, and the ultimate capitulation of the Big Three, General Motors, Chrysler, and Ford, to the forces of the Union.
World. War II brought a new era of responsibility to labor leadership. Successively Reuther rose to head the UAW and the CIO. In the 1950’s, he helped merge the twin giants of the American labor movement, the older American Federation of Labor and the CIO. He worked to fight rising prices and for full employment.
Though assassins’ bullets twice endangered his life, he continued to work hard building the house of labor until his death in a plane crash in 1970.
Eugene V. Debs: A Man Unafraid by McAlister Coleman
/0 Comments/in Biographies, Biography, Free Ebooks, Labor History /by Jim McCabeTo download an epub file for your Android tablet or Chromebook or Apple device, click below:
To download a mobi file for your Amazon device, click below:
From a Review by H.L. Mencken in the American Mercury, August 1930.
“Mr. Coleman has told his story very well.”
MR. COLEMAN’S sub-title may seem a bit pretentious, but the record bears it out. Debs was one of those fanatics who are simply unacquainted with the meaning of fear. At a time when practically all of the other Socialists of America were running ignominiously for cover he stood his ground magnificently and went to jail without a quaver. He would have gone to the gallows, I believe, in the same serene and unperturbed manner. Perhaps it is something of a slander to call him a Socialist at all. He died without knowing more than the A B C of Marxism, and had relatively little to do with its chief prophets. The shabbiness of spirit that is their chief mark, at least on this side of the water, was not in him. An ignorant man, and, in more than one way, a childishly silly man, he yet managed to show a singular fineness of character.
Someday, I suppose, his admirers will be comparing him to Lincoln, as Lincoln is compared to Jesus. The likeness is faulty in each case. Lincoln was a far shrewder and more politic fellow than Jesus, and Debs was far braver and more forthright than Lincoln. In old Abe, in fact, the cross-roads politician was always visible. He never did anything without figuring out its consequences to five places of decimals, and when those consequences promised to damage his private fortunes he usually found a good reason to refrain. But Debs banged through life without caring a damn, innocent and cocksure. He got into trouble very often, but I can find no evidence that he was ever bothered by doubts.
If common decency ever gets any credit in America, and the schoolbooks are revised accordingly, there will be a chapter in them on the great encounter between Debs and Woodrow Wilson. They never met face to face, for Wilson was in the White House and Debs was in prison; nevertheless, their souls came together, and it was old Gene’s that won hands down.
The conflict between them had been fought out in the world many times before, but never by two such perfect champions. On the side of Wilson were power, eminence, learning, glory, a vast forensic skill, a haughty manner, and the almost unanimous support of the American press and people; on the side of Debs there was only the dignity of an honest and honorable man. Debs remained behind the bars, but Wilson danced naked before the world, exposed to posterity as the abject and pathetic bounder that he was. It was his tragedy that he was not only quite unable to achieve decency himself, but also quite unable to recognize it in other men. When he died Harding turned Debs loose, with a gesture both generous and charming. Thus it remained for a boozy Elk out of the Jimson weed country to teach manners to a Princeton Presbyterian….
The whole labor movement in the United States is in the hands of sleek, oily gentlemen who have learned that it is far more comfortable to make terms with the bosses than to fight them. These gentlemen, as I have said, are well fed and well tailored, and have no sympathy with dreamers. Presently they will be collecting money for a monument to old Sam Gompers. But they will never propose a monument to Debs. • In the long run, however, he will probably be recalled, at all events by romantics. There was genuinely heroic blood in him, though he sacrificed himself to a chimera. Mr. Coleman has told his story very well.
Patrick Henry: Firebrand of the Revolution by Nardi Campion, Reading Level is 5.6
/0 Comments/in Biographies, Biography, For Young Adults, Founders, Free Ebooks /by Jim McCabeTo read this ebook on a computer or tablet using Google Play Books, or iBooks on your iPad, download this epub format.
To read on a device from Amazon, here is the ebook in mobi format.
Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .
The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.
“Firebrand” is an engaging biography of a pivotal figure in America’s fight for independence.
A reviewer from Goodreads writes “This is an older biography of Patrick Henry (1961), with target audience of middle school/junior high. Overall, this was a really excellent read, with plenty of details about Henry’s life and career, but not too overwhelming. It’s written to engage younger readers, so there is some dialogue and little anecdotes along the way, but most of these stories added to the character development of Henry, helping us to see what shaped him throughout his younger years and even as an adult.”
Vanquishing Yellow Fever by Edward F. Dolan
/0 Comments/in For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, History of Science /by Jim McCabeEpub or Mobi?
The epub format below is for your Apple and Android devices and in one case for Amazon devices. As you may know, Amazon has changed to the epub format to use with the Send to Kindle program. A great feature of the Send to Kindle program is that the file will go directly to your Library folder, and not have to be searched for in ES File Explorer or another app. If you use the mobi format in Send to Kindle, you will now get an error message. You can see instructions about Send to Kindle at https://www.amazon.com/gp/sendtokindle/email.
So if you are using this ebook on Apple, or Android devices, or in the Send to Kindle program, you can download this epub file below.
If you or your students want to download directly from this web site to an Amazon device, you can use the mobi format below. When you find the mobi file in ES File Explorer, it will then open in the Kindle app on your tablet. If you download an epub file to your Amazon tablet, it will also open if you have an app such as Overdrive on your tablet. The Kindle app offers an excellent reading experience to start with. Overdrive may need some customization of font size.
No sooner had the Spanish-American War ended —a war lasting less than five months—than a killer of men appeared in Cuba that was far deadlier than any man-made arms. Yellow fever, which for centuries had ravaged the island population, struck down Cubans and Americans alike.
The cause of yellow fever was unknown. It was believed to be spread by disease-fouled bedding and clothes of the victims. With only this theory at hand, Walter Reed went to Cuba in 1900 as head of the Army’s Yellow Fever Commission. His orders from Surgeon General George Sternberg were: “Wipe it out, Major, before it destroys all of the American occupation force in Cuba, wipe it out if you can.”
Reed was well qualified for the task. When the Spanish-American War had broken out, he had been appointed chairman of a committee to investigate the cause and mode of propagation of typhoid fever, which had broken out among the soldiers. His Report on the Origin and Spread of Typhoid Fever in U. S. Military Camps, published after Reed’s death, revealed a number of facts about the disease that had not been known before.
Earlier Reed and an associate had disproved the theory of Giuseppe Sanarelli, that the Bacillus icteroides was the cause of yellow fever.
Vanquishing Yellow Fever is the story of brave men—those doctors James Carroll, Jesse Lazear, and Aristides Agramonte, who served with Reed on the Commission, and the volunteers who risked their lives by subjecting themselves to the bite of the dreaded mosquito. Edward Dolan presents this dramatic story in a striking and gripping manner.
The determination of the Commissioners to succeed is a lesson in itself. At first they met defeat at every turn; finally they turned to the discredited theory of Dr. Carlos Juan Finlay: that the yellow fever virus was carried by the mosquito, Culex fasciatus, and that the disease was induced by its bite.
Dr. Jesse Lazear died proving the validity of this theory by experimenting upon himself. Reed, after successfully carrying out his orders, returned to Washington, D. C, in 1901, where he died November 23, 1902. The Army general hospital in Washington, D. C. was named in his honor.
Louis Pasteur-Founder of Microbiology by Mary June Burton
/0 Comments/in Free Ebooks, History of Science /by Jim McCabeTo read this ebook using Google Play Books on your tablet, or computer, or iBooks on an iPad, download this epub format.
To read on a device from Amazon, or on the Kindle app on your computer, here is the ebook in mobi format.
Learn how Louis Pasteur discovered which microbes were beneficial and which were deadly to mankind.
His years of patient and exhaustive research on the germ theory of disease earned this tireless French chemist a place as one of the true IMMORTALS OF SCIENCE.
Perhaps Pasteur is best known for showing how harmful bacteria could be killed by holding them at a definite temperature for a certain length of time. Later this process acquired its discoverer’s name—pasteurization.
And Pasteur improved the practice of medicine in his day in a major way. It was his research that inspired the British surgeon Joseph Lister to demand that doctors keep germs out of surgeries. Post-surgery deaths from gangrene plummeted due to the work of Pasteur and Lister. Gangrene did not have to set in after surgery if doctors, instruments and bandages and beddings were germ free.
Pasteur was also instrumental in opening a breach in the fight against cholera, yellow fever, and diphtheria. This biography is written at a 10.3 grade level according to the Flesch-Kincaid readability scale available in Microsoft Word.
Edward Jenner and Smallpox Vaccination by Irmengarde Eberle
/0 Comments/in Biographies, For Young Adults, Free Ebooks, History of Science /by Jim McCabeHis Discoveries Saved Millions of Lives
To read this ebook on a computer using Google Play Books, or iBooks on your tablet or iPad, download this epub format.
To download a mobi file for your Amazon device, click below.
Directions on how to email this file to your device are here.
To add this mobi file to your Kindle for PC software to read the chapters on your computer, see these instructions .
The Kindle Personal Document Service allows teachers, or librarians to send a mobi file to up to 15 student Kindle email addresses at a time.
With Calibre, you and your students can read this ebook in epub format on computer screens. By changing the background color, and enlarging the font, the reading experience on a computer screen is reasonable. On Chromebooks, you will need to use Google Play Books. Calibre is not available for Chromebooks.