New Releases by Jenn Vaughn

Reframing the American story from the vantage point of the nation’s watery edges, Jamin Wells shows that disasters have not only bedeviled the American beach — they created it. Though the American beach is now one of the most commercialized, contested, and engineered places on the planet, few people visited it or called it home at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, the American beach had become the summer encampment of presidents, a common destination for millions of citizens, and the site of rapidly growing beachfront communities. Shipwrecked tells the story of this epic transformation, arguing that coastal shipwrecks themselves changed how Americans viewed, used, and inhabited the shoreline. Drawing on a broad range of archival material — including logbooks, court cases, personal papers, government records, and cultural ephemera — Wells examines how shipwrecks laid the groundwork for the beach tourism industry that would transform the American beach from coastal frontier to oceanfront playspace, spur substantial state and private investment alongshore, reshape popular ideas about the coast, and turn the beach into a touchstone of the American experience.

Exploring the innovation and physical science behind bridges and tunnels, the activities and projects in this book encourage children to learn about the design and construction of these amazing passageways. This fun and educational reference uses hands-on projects to explain complex concepts, such as Newton's Third Law of Motion, while trivia and fun facts illustrate engineering ingenuity and achievements. The activities engage kids in the important skills involved in engineering-including designing, building, and modeling-and teach the value of trial and error as they create several bridge models. Activities include making an egg bungee jump, a soda pop can engine, and a triangular toothpick dome, as well as experiments with liquefaction and corrosion.