At the end of the 19th century, “Professor” Henry C. Friend claimed to have a revolutionary process that used electricity to refine sugar—only he wasn’t a professor, and the process was a sham. A close-up of the notorious con man whose sweet nothings swindled investors out of millions
Jimi Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner brought the sounds of Vietnam to the crowd at Woodstock. But he wasn’t the only musician to reimagine the national anthem during a time of war.
Thousands of women began their careers at NASA as computers, before the advent of electronic machines. A diverse and potent force in space exploration, their calculations were ultimately responsible for sending astronauts to the moon.
Read an excerpt from Chasing the Moon: The People, the Politics, and the Promise that Launched America into the Space Program, by Robert Stone and Alan Andres, out June 4, 2019 from Ballantine Books.
