Speaker’s Book:

Wind, Sand, and Stars, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Airship Mishaps: Terror in the Skies

Print:

• Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel, by Douglas Botting
• The Great Dirigibles: Their triumphs & Disasters, by John Toland
• The Golden Age of the Great Passenger Airships: Graf Zeppelin & Hindenburg, by Harold G. Dick, Douglas Hill Robinson

Online:

• “The Hindenburg Disaster” – Airships.net
• Image of the LZ4 Crash – Library of Congress

Space Madness: Trouble on the Mir

Print:

• Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir, by Bryan Burrough
• Off the Planet: Surviving Five Perilous Months Aboard the Space Station Mir, by Jerry M. Linenger

Online:

• “Fire! How the Mir Incident Changed Space Station Safety” – Universe Today
• “Handling Mir Misinformation” – James Oberg
• “Jerry Linenger: Fire and Controversy” – NASA

Blundering Generals and Crazy Weather: The Screwups that Saved America

Print:

• 1776, by David McCullough
• What If? The World’s Most Famous Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, edited by Robert Cowley
• The Philadelphia Campaign, by Stephen Taffe

Online:

• “Washington takes command of Continental Army in 1775” – US Army
• “George Washington” & “Thomas Mifflin” – US Army
• “The Battle of Yorktown: the Glorious Cause for American Revolution” – TheAmericanRevolution.org
• “The Battle of Long Island (Brooklyn Heights)” – TheAmericanRevolution.org
• “Battle of Long Island” – MountVernon.org
• Finding the Maryland 400: A Maryand State Archives Research Project – Maryland State Archives

The Worst Disaster in US Maritime History (that you’ve never heard of)

Print:

• Loss of the Sultana and Reminiscences of Survivors: History of a Disaster Where Over One Thousand Five Hundred Human Beings Were Lost, Most of Them Being Exchanged Prisoners of War on Their Way Home After Privation and Suffering from One to Twenty-Three Months, by Rev Chester D Berry
• The Sultana Tragedy: America’s Greatest Maritime Disaster, by Jerry O Potter
• Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, by Alan Huffman

Online:

• Radio Story: “The Shipwreck That Led Confederate Veterans To Risk All For Union Lives” – NPR
• “Sultana Disaster” – Tennessee State Library and Archives
•  Marion, AR 150 Anniversary Page – Sultana Disaster Museum
• “Death on the River” – US Naval Institute

Rubber Duckies & Friends: Lost Cargo & Understanding Ocean Currents

Print:

• Flotsametrics and the Floating World: How One Man’s Obsession with Runaway Sneakers and Rubber Ducks Revolutionized Ocean Science, by Curtis Ebbesmeyer, Eric Scigliano
• Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and of the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them, by Donovan Hohn

Online:

• “Beachcombing Science from Bath Toys” – Beachcomber’s Alert
• “A True Duck Hunt: Interview with Donovan Hohn” – Scientific American
• “Friendly Floatees — What 29,000 Yellow Ducks, Red Beavers, Blue Turtles and Green Frogs Tell Us About Ocean Dumping” – The Old Salt Blog

The Curse of the Narrows, and the A(ccidental)-Bomb

Print:

• The Curse of the Narrows, by Laura MacDonald
• The Town That Died: A Chronicle Of The Halifax Explosion, by Michael J Bird

Online:

• HalifaxExplosion.org
• Halifax Explosion – Historica Canada
• Halifax Local Coverage – Halifax Regional Municipality

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnnAGbi84hk

For each salon, we invite our speakers to share the resources and interesting reading they came across in researching their talk, so that we can all dig more deeply. This reading list was compiled by Odd Salon with Justin Quimby, Michael Brodhead, Arthur Kay, Matthew Nelson, Isolde Honoré, and Miles Traer. Thank you!