Children of today are so used to going everywhere quickly and comfortably in the family car, they take the whole thing for granted. They don't have a clue about the problems and challenges that had to be met by early inventors and automobile factories to make a smooth ride possible for us today. So why not bring one of the inventors of the automobile right into your classroom! Introduce Henry Ford to your students and let them discover for themselves the exciting early history of cars!
In the 1920s, Henry Ford hired thousands of African American men for his open-shop system of auto manufacturing. This move was a rejection of the notion that better jobs were for white men only. In The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford
"My Life and Work", by Henry Ford, reads not only as a memoir of an American icon, but also shows the spirit that built America. Written in 1922, this work provides a unique insight into the observations, ideas, and problem solving skills of this remarkable man. He shares his success and his failures and the lessons he learned form both. Throughout, Ford shows a constant belief in the value of hard work and in the goodness of men. It is a story of management, of ethics, of observation, of history and of greatness. This book includes quote highlights, photos and a special area for a reader to jot notes.
How a Michigan farm boy became the richest man in America is a classic, almost mythic tale, but never before has Henry Ford’s outsized genius been brought to life so vividly as it is in this engaging and superbly researched biography. The real Henry Ford was a tangle of contradictions. He set off the consumer revolution by producing a car affordable to the masses, all the while lamenting the moral toll exacted by consumerism. He believed in giving his workers a living wage, though he was entirely opposed to union labor. He had a warm and loving relationship with his wife, but sired a son with another woman. A rabid anti-Semite, he nonetheless embraced African American workers in the era of Jim Crow. Uncovering the man behind the myth, situating his achievements and their attendant controversies firmly within the context of early twentieth-century America, Watts has given us a comprehensive, illuminating, and fascinating biography of one of America’s first mass-culture celebrities.
A riveting, behind-the-scenes account of the near collapse of the Ford Motor Company, which in 2008 was close to bankruptcy, and CEO Alan Mulally's hard-fought effort and bold plan--including his decision not to take federal bailout money--to bring Ford back from the brink.
From Pulitzer Prize-winning author Greg Grandin comes the stunning, never before told story of the quixotic attempt to recreate small-town America in the heart of the Amazon In 1927, Henry Ford, the richest man in the world, bought a tract of land twice the size of Delaware in the Brazilian Amazon. His intention was to grow rubber, but the project rapidly evolved into a more ambitious bid to export America itself, along with its golf courses, ice-cream shops, bandstands, indoor plumbing, and Model Ts rolling down broad streets. Fordlandia, as the settlement was called, quickly became the site of an epic clash. On one side was the car magnate, lean, austere, the man who reduced industrial production to its simplest motions; on the other, the Amazon, lush, extravagant, the most complex ecological system on the planet. Ford's early success in imposing time clocks and square dances on the jungle soon collapsed, as indigenous workers, rejecting his midwestern Puritanism, turned the place into a ribald tropical boomtown. Fordlandia's eventual demise as a rubber plantation foreshadowed the practices that today are laying waste to the rain forest. More than a parable of one man's arrogant attempt to force his will on the natural world, Fordlandia depicts a desperate quest to salvage the bygone America that the Ford factory system did much to dispatch. As Greg Grandin shows in this gripping and mordantly observed history, Ford's great delusion was not that the Amazon could be tamed but that the forces of capitalism, once released, might yet be contained. Fordlandia is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.
Where can you find dinosaur footprints or rune stones? How salty is the Great Salt Lake? Where can you find a moon bow? From Maine to Hawaii, from Alaska to Florida, students tour the USA with a collection of fun facts, games and puzzles. Enhance your geography and social studies curriculum with reproducible activities such as Alabama Bingo, Florida Tic-Tac-Toe and Louisiana Question Game.
Treat your students to an exciting hot air balloon ride across the USA. There's lots to see and do as each state is visited (the District of Columbia, too), its history and geography explored, and fascinating facts explained. There are map activities, places and physical features to identify, and topics for further investigation. There are parks, lakes, mountains and swamps to discover as well as the thousands of plants and animals that share our land and water. This product has been selected by a national panel of classroom teachers as a winner of Learning Magazine's Teachers' Choice Award.
Welcome to the fascinating world of the American twentieth century — a time when changes in technology, communications, and transportation changed the world. The activities in this book provide an overview of social, historical, and cultural events in the U.S. during the twentieth century. People entered the twentieth century on horses, steamships, and steam locomotives and left it in Concord jets, nuclear submarines, and space shuttles. The eight full-color transparencies at the back of the book (print books) or the included PowerPoint slides (eBooks) can be used alone or with specific activities listed in the table of contents.
