Black History in STEM

Packed with fascinating biographical sketches of female engineers, this chronological history of engineering brightens previously shadowy corners of our increasingly engineered world's recent past. In addition to a detailed description of the diverse arenas encompassed by the word 'engineering' and a nuanced overview of the development of the field, the book includes numerous statistics and thought provoking facts about women's roles in the achievement of thrilling scientific innovations. This text is a unique resource for students launching research projects in engineering and related fields, professionals interested in gaining a broader understanding of how engineering as a discipline has been impacted by events of global significance, and scholars of women's immense, often obscured, contributions to scientific progress.

This pathbreaking book goes beyond the lip-service traditionally paid to Black women scientists and illuminates their scientific contributions, struggles, strategies, and triumphs. Drawn heavily from primary sources, Warren's original reference guide includes biographies of more than 100 Black women scientists in fields from anatomy and mathematics to psychology and zoology.

An intimate and sensitive psychological portrait, a well informed intellectual sketch, and an unusually readable scientific treatise, this biography of Carver has a depth and a breadth of research rarely found in such studies.

The Life of Benjamin Banneker offers remarkable insights and artistry in its picture of a time of fascinating social complexity requiring delicacy in its diagnosis and skill in its reconstruction. It is difficult to characterize this exquisite story of the first black scientist without superlatives which seem out of place in describing an account of a life so simple and at the same time so sublime and which is reproduced in masterful prose equally simple, accurate and appropriate. Here is a searching book that like a light suddenly thrown on in the darkness illuminates a long neglected scientific spirit struggling for recognition.

The phenomenal true story of the black female mathematicians at NASA at the leading edge of the feminist and civil rights movement, whose calculations helped fuel some of America's greatest achievements in space--a powerful, revelatory contribution that is as essential to our understanding of race, discrimination, and achievement in modern America as Between the World and Me and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The basis for the smash & Academy Award-nominated film starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monae, Kirsten Dunst, and Kevin Costner. Before John Glenn orbited the earth, or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as "human computers" used pencils, slide rules and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Among these problem-solvers were a group of exceptionally talented African American women, some of the brightest minds of their generation. Hidden Figures follows the interwoven accounts of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Christine Darden, four African American women who participated in some of NASA's greatest successes. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades as they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country's future.

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells--taken without her knowledge--became one of the most important tools in medicine: The first "immortal" human cells grown in culture, which are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb's effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.  Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave. Henrietta's family did not learn of her "immortality" until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family--past and present--is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.  Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family--especially Henrietta's daughter Deborah. Deborah was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Had they killed her to harvest her cells? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn't her children afford health insurance?  Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

From the author of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry and the host of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, a memoir about growing up and a young man's budding scientific curiosity. This is the absorbing story of Neil deGrasse Tyson's lifelong fascination with the night sky, a restless wonder that began some thirty years ago on the roof of his Bronx apartment building and eventually led him to become the director of the Hayden Planetarium. A unique chronicle of a young man who at one time was both nerd and jock, Tyson's memoir could well inspire other similarly curious youngsters to pursue their dreams. Like many athletic kids he played baseball, won medals in track and swimming, and was captain of his high school wrestling team. But at the same time he was setting up a telescope on winter nights, taking an advanced astronomy course at the Hayden Planetarium, and spending a summer vacation at an astronomy camp in the Mojave Desert. Eventually, his scientific curiosity prevailed, and he went on to graduate in physics from Harvard and to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics from Columbia. There followed postdoctoral research at Princeton. In 1996, he became the director of the Hayden Planetarium, where some twenty-five years earlier he had been awed by the spectacular vista in the sky theater. Tyson pays tribute to the key teachers and mentors who recognized his precocious interests and abilities, and helped him succeed. He intersperses personal reminiscences with thoughts on scientific literacy, careful science vs. media hype, the possibility that a meteor could someday hit the Earth, dealing with society's racial stereotypes, what science can and cannot say about the existence of God, and many other interesting insights about science, society, and the nature of the universe. Now available in paperback with a new preface and other additions, this engaging memoir will enlighten and inspire an appreciation of astronomy and the wonders of our universe.

According to the stereotype, late-19th and early-20th-century inventors, quintessential loners and supposed geniuses, worked in splendid isolation and then unveiled their discoveries to a marvelling world. Most successful inventors of this era, however, developed their ideas within the framework of industrial organizations that supported them and their experiments. For African-American inventors, negotiating these racially stratified professional environments meant not only working on innovative designs but also breaking barriers. Americans: Granville Woods, an independent inventor; Lewis Latimer, a corporate engineer with General Electric; and Shelby Davidson, who worked in the US Treasury Department. Detailing the difficulties and human frailties that make their achievements all the more impressive, Fouche explains how each man used invention for financial gain, as a claim on entering adversarial environments, and as a means to technical stature in a Jim Crow institutional setting. complicated racial identities - as both black and white communities perceived them - with their hopes of being judged solely on the content of their inventive work, Fouche provides a nuanced view of African American contributions to - and relationships with - technology during a period of rapid industrialization and mounting national attention to the inequities of a separate-but-equal social order.