Munson Baldwin

In With Brass and Gas: An Illustrated and Embellished Chronicle of Ballooning in Mid-Nineteenth Century America, Munson Baldwin compiles a narrative of aeronauts' work in the 1850s. Baldwin draws upon the aeronauts' own memoirs, articles in popular magazines such as The Knickerbocker and the British Quarterly Review, as well as newspapers, including Harper's Weekly and the New York Evening Post. He organizes the narrative into a series of stories about important or sensational flights culminating in the push for a transatlantic voyage in the 1850s. The overall structure resembles a scrapbook of newspaper articles, with columns and small blocks representing the original text. Owen Wood's illustrations nicely dramatize the text and help put faces to names. With Brass and Gas is ideal for those researching the history of flight as it serves as a primary source reader and will also entertain fans of Jules Verne who want to read similar stories of historical fact.… (más)