Showing results by narrator "Douglas R. Pratt" in All Categories

Don't form a personal opinion and don't get involved. The editors recommended a 'just the facts' focus for this cub reporter...For his first few years on the job, journalist Tom Rivers did his best to heed that advice. But living and working in a small town, it's hard to stay out of the story. So when the editors offered him a bi-weekly column 10 years ago, Rivers jumped at the chance to share some his own ideas, adventures, and the occasional off-beat story that just didn't fit the news-article form.

In 1977, NASA launched the space probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. This audiobook tells of what was known about those planets and their moons before the Voyager missions, as well as what Voyager discovered about those planets and their moons. This audiobook is written for the middle-grade listener, and can be enjoyed by readers age 12 and up.

Tom Rivers, a reporter for The Daily News in Batavia, wrote a first-person series about farm work in 2008 that won state and national awards. Now the series, with more background and other information, has been compiled in a newly released audiobook, Farm Hands: Hard Work and Hard Lessons from Western New York Fields. Rivers worked at a dozen farms in Orleans and Genesee counties, trying to find out why so few local residents are willing to work on farms. He discovered the work requires many skills, enormous willpower and physical strength.

Obama's administration is the most anti-traditional-America regime ever to hold power in Washington D.C. Kent Clizbe analyzed Obama's political roots in the run-up to the 2008 election. He continued to provide incisive commentary and analysis as Obama's handlers governed. Obliterating Exceptionalism is a collection of analytical commentary from the beginning of Obama's destructive operation against our country. It is the first draft of the history of the first PC-Progressive administration bent on destroying America.

Ready to begin homeschooling? Let hundreds of experienced homeschoolers help you on your way! Whether you're a new homeschooler, or just looking for a better way to learn with your children, this guide offers the answers and encouragement you need to succeed.

The Left continues to use race as a dividing issue in national politics, but is it really as bad as they portray? Join author D. Lee as he shows just how far the Left will go in it's use of racial language to stir up the American public. Outrageous, informative, and enlightening, you will learn the truth about how race-baiting has become a "way of life" for the Left, even going so far as to manufacture issues that don't even exist.

The Key to Thyroid Health: The Thyroid Solution Diet is an audiobook that outlines all the current information that is available on issues with the thyroid. An increasing number of persons have been diagnosed with thyroid issues in the last few years and as such, various solutions are being sought to alleviate the symptoms of the condition. Quite a number of texts have been published on the topic as well.

New advances in medical science and the unraveling of the human genome are providing us great insights to the aging process. We can now significantly increase our healthy longevity and live long enough to take advantage of the even newer technologies being developed. The overall deterioration of the body that comes with growing old is not inevitable. Aging is a treatable disease. So if you want to increase your chances of living a long and healthy life, maybe even becoming immortal, you need to learn what you can do today.

A comprehensive study of the missile system that formed a critical component of the United States' nuclear arsenal. The Titan II ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) program was developed by the United States military to bolster the size, strength, and speed of the nation's strategic weapons arsenal in the 1950s and 1960s.

Political turmoil surrounding immigration at the federal level and the inability of Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform have provided an opening for state and local governments to become more active in setting their own immigration-related policies. States largely dictate the resources, institutions, and opportunities immigrants can access: who can get a driver’s license or attend a state university, what languages are spoken in schools and public offices, how law enforcement interacts with the public, and even what schools teach students about history.

The long view of the path to the Civil War, as charted through the Jeffersonian and Jacksonian eras in this book, reveals the critical fault in the nation’s foundation, exacerbated by slaveholding expansionists like Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, and Douglas, until the house they built upon it could no longer stand for two opposite ideas at once.

Although Lincoln’s adult life as president, statesman, and savior of the Union has been well documented and analyzed, most biographers have regarded his early years as inconsequential to his career and accomplishments. But in 1920, a group of historians known as the Lincoln Inquiry were determined to give Lincoln’s formative years their due. Abe’s Youth takes a look into their writings, which focus on Lincoln’s life between seven and 21 years of age.

There is a conventional wisdom about oil that the US military presence in the Persian Gulf is what guarantees access to this strategic resource; that the "special" relationship with Saudi Arabia is necessary to stabilize an otherwise volatile market; and that these assumptions in turn provide Washington enormous leverage over Europe and Asia. Except, the conventional wisdom is wrong.

Cottonwood and the River of Time looks at some of the approaches scientists have used to unravel the puzzles of the natural world. With a lifetime of work in forestry and genetics to guide him, Reinhard Stettler celebrates both what has been learned and what still remains a mystery as he examines not only cottonwoods but also trees more generally, their evolution, and their relationship to society.

John C. Frémont was the most celebrated explorer of his era. In 1842, on the first of five expeditions he would lead to the Far West, Frémont and a small party of men journeyed up the Kansas and Platte Rivers to the Wind River Range in Wyoming. At the time, virtually this entire region was known as the Great Desert, and many Americans viewed it and the Rocky Mountains beyond as natural barriers to the United States.

Engines of Empire tells the story of the complex relationship between Victorians and their wondrous steamships, following famous travelers like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Jules Verne as well as ordinary spectators, tourists, and imperial administrators as they crossed oceans bound for the colonies. Rich with anecdotes and wry humor, it is a fascinating glimpse into a world where an empire felt powerful and anything seemed possible if there was an engine behind it.

In A Constitutional Culture, Adrian Chastain Weimer uncovers the story of how more than a hundred years before the American Revolution, colonists pledged their lives and livelihoods to the defense of local political institutions against arbitrary rule.

In Frontier Country, Patrick Spero addresses one of the most important and controversial subjects in American history: the frontier. Countering the modern conception of the American frontier as an area of expansion, Spero employs the eighteenth-century meaning of the term to show how colonists understood it as a vulnerable, militarized boundary. The Pennsylvania frontier, Spero argues, was constituted through conflicts not only between colonists and Native Americans but also among neighboring British colonies.

Before the widespread popularity of automobiles, buses, and trucks, freight and passenger trains bound the nation together. The Station Agent and the American Railroad Experience explores the role of local frontline workers that kept the country's vast rail network running.

A year after John Bradstreet’s raid of 1758—the first and largest British American riverine raid mounted during the Seven Years’ War (known in North America as the French and Indian War)—Benjamin Franklin hailed it as one of the great “American” victories of the war. Bradstreet heartily agreed, and soon enough, his own official account was adopted by Francis Parkman and other early historians.