Required Texts

The following books are required for the course and are on sale at the University Bookstore.

Strunk, Jr., William, and E.B. White.  Elements of Style.  New York: Allyn & Bacon, 1999.

Marius, Richard.  A Short Guide to Writing About History. New York: Addison-Wesley Pub Co., 1999.

Bilstein, Roger E.  Flight in America: From the Wrights to the Astronauts.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994.  Paper ISBN: 0801848288

Burrows, William E.  This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age.  New York: Random House, 1999.

Chaikin, Andrew L.  A Man on the Moon: The Voyages of the Apollo Astronauts.  New York, Penguin, 1998.

McDougall, Walter A.  The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1997.

Singer, Bala. Like Sex with Gods: An Unorthodox History of Flying. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M Press, 2005.

Wolf, Tom.  The Right Stuff.  New York: Bantam, 1983.

Recommended Works

The following are highly recommended, but the list is meant as suggestive only, not comprehensive.   I have selected works that indicate the broad range of approaches to the subject.

Bulkeley, Rip.  The Sputniks Crisis in the United States: A Critique of the Historiography of Space.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.  An important revisionist thesis.

Chaisson, Eric.  The Hubble Wars: Astrophysics Meets Astropolitics in the Two Billion Dollar Struggle Over the Hubble Space Telescope. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.   A participant's memoir covering some of the same events as Smith, et al., below.

Cooper, Henry S. F.  numerous books over thirty years compiling his journalistic accounts originally published in The New Yorker.

Corn, Joseph J.  The Winged Gospel : America's Romance With Aviation, 1900-1950.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.  Broad social and cultural history.

Lambright, W. Henry.  Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.  Biography and political science at its best.

Launius, Roger D. NASA: A History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Malabar, Florida: Krieger, 1994.  Excellent short introduction.

Logsdon, John M., et al. Editors, Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program. Volume 1: Organizing for Exploration;  Volume 2:  External Relationships;  Volume 3: Using Space;  Volume 4: Accessing Space.  Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1995-present.  Major series publishing primary sources with contextual interpretive essays.  Available in the Department of History Student Lounge and in the UMBC Government Documents collection.

McCurdy, Howard.  Space and the American Imagination.  Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

Neufeld, Michael J.  The Rocket and the Reich : Peenemunde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.  Major revisionist study of the German rocket team and its relationship to its several host states. 

Smith, Robert W., Paul A. Hanle, Robert Kargon, and Joseph N. Tatarewicz. The Space Telescope a Study of NASA, Science, Technology, and Politics. New York Cambridge University Press, 1993.  Team history account of some of the same events covered by Chaisson, above.

Zabusky, Stacia E. Launching Europe: An Ethnography of European Cooperation in Space Science. Princeton University Press, 1995.  Anthropological account of Europe's space program.

Basic Bibliographic Reference Sources in the UMBC Library for History of Space Flight

ABC-CLIO.  America: History and Life.  UMBC Reference (CD-Rom) and available through UMBC Library home page.

History of Science Society. Isis Cumulative Bibliography 1966-1975: a Bibliography of the History of Science Formed From Isis Critical Bibliographies 91-100 Indexing Literature Published From 1965 Through 1974. London: Mansell, 1980.  UMBC REF: Q7405.H6I2

History of Science Society. Isis Cumulative Bibliography 1976-1985: a Bibliography of the History of Science Formed From Isis Critical Bibliographies 101-110 Indexing Literature Published From 1975 Through 1984. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.  UMBC REF: Q125.I84 1989  For literature since 1984 see the annual Isis Critical Bibliography, with the journal issues in the serials department.  Dialog and UnCover (available via the UMBC Library home page) index recent literature.