Gregory Conan Watts has been hired to prove the impossible. To do so, he's expected to assemble a crew that includes war heroes, carnies, respectable women, and one wilderness scout who may or may not be entirely insane. They’ll have the best of 1815 technology: a state-of-the-art airship and the steam-powered battle suit that almost single-handedly brought down Napoleon’s alliance. Finding vast uncharted wonders Gregory's not even sure are there sounded complicated enough; he wasn’t expecting natural disasters, outright sabotage ... or another war. Dawn of Steam: First Light is an alt-history/emergent Steampunk epistolary novel.

This book presents the U.S. Army Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG) as an example of successful change by the Army in wartime. It argues that creating the AWG required senior leaders to create a vision differing from the Army’s self-conceptualization, change bureaucratic processes to turn the vision into an actual unit, and then place the new unit in the hands of uniquely qualified leaders to build and sustain it. In doing this, it considers the forces influencing change within the Army and argues the two most significant are its self-conceptualization and institutional bureaucracy. The work explores three major subject areas that provide historical context. The first is the Army’s institutional history from the early 1950s through 2001. This period begins with the Army seeking to validate its place in America’s national security strategy and ends with the Army trying to chart a path into the post-Cold War future. The Army’s history is largely one of asymmetric warfare. The work thus examines several campaigns that offered lessons for subsequent wars. Some lessons the Army took to heart, others it ignored. As the AWG was a direct outgrowth of the failures and frustrations the Army experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, the book examines these campaigns and identifies the specific problems that led senior Army leaders to create the AWG. Finally, the work chronicles the AWG’s creation in 2006, growth, and re-assignment from the Army staff to a fully-fledged organization subordinate to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command in 2011 to its deactivation. This action resulted not from the unit’s failure to adapt to a post-insurgency Army focusing on modernization. Rather, it resulted from the Army failing to realize that while the AWG was a product of counterinsurgency, it provided the capability to support the Army during a period of great strategic and institutional uncertainty.

Architect David Wright helped pioneer the concept of passive solar architecture, and his thoughts and experiments have helped shape the evolution of solar design throughout the world. His years of exploration are distilled in this comprehensive book, which provides simple graphics and language to illuminate concepts including greenhouse effect, heat storage, surface-to-volume ratio, ventilation, and cooling.. Tips, rules-of-thumb, regional characteristics, and many other considerations are presented to help readers, from initial site selection to visionary design. Written for architects, designers, and others who seek to tap the free resources offered by earth and sun, this invaluable tool will help reduce dependence on outside energy sources. You will be inspired.

In 1881, Brazilian Aluisio Azevedo published Mulatto, a scathing expose of his native city, Sao Luis do Maranhao. Polemic as well as love story, it brought him much notoriety and is generally considered the first Brazilian naturalist novel. Set before the abolition of slavery and the establishment of the first republic, Mulatto tells the story of Raimundo, a young Brazilian of liberal ideas. Kept in ignorance of the identity of his mother and the secret of his mixed birth, Raimundo is educated in Europe and, upon returning to Brazil, struggles against the provincial and bigoted society he encounters. Mulatto reveals its author's opposition to both the clergy, whose corruption and influence he denounced, and the racist agrarian society still dependent upon slavery. This English translation of Mulatto was first published in 1990 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press.