Airborne Dreams

An account of Pan Ams Nisei stewardess program (1955&–1972), through which the airline hired Japanese American (and later other Asian and Asian American) stewardesses, ostensibly for their Asian-language skills.

DIVA historical and anthropological look at Pan Am's "Nisei stewardesses" program, which recruited Japanese-American flight attendants./div

An innovative anthology showcasing Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories Our Voices, Our Histories brings together thirty-five Asian American and Pacific Islander authors in a single volume to explore the historical experiences, perspectives, and actions of Asian American and Pacific Islander women in the United States and beyond. This volume is unique in exploring Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s lives along local, transnational, and global dimensions. The contributions present new research on diverse aspects of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s history, from the politics of language, to the role of food, to experiences as adoptees, mixed race, and second generation, while acknowledging shared experiences as women of color in the United States. Our Voices, Our Histories showcases how new approaches in US history, Asian American and Pacific Islander studies, and Women’s and Gender studies inform research on Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Attending to the collective voices of the women themselves, the volume seeks to transform current understandings of Asian American and Pacific Islander women’s histories.

In the decades following World War II, municipal leaders and ordinary citizens embraced San Francisco’s identity as the “Gateway to the Pacific,” using it to reimagine and rebuild the city. The city became a cosmopolitan center on account of its newfound celebration of its Japanese and other Asian American residents, its economy linked with Asia, and its favorable location for transpacific partnerships. The most conspicuous testament to San Francisco’s postwar transpacific connections is the Japanese Cultural and Trade Center in the city’s redeveloped Japanese-American enclave. Focusing on the development of the Center, Meredith Oda shows how this multilayered story was embedded within a larger story of the changing institutions and ideas that were shaping the city. During these formative decades, Oda argues, San Francisco’s relations with and ideas about Japan were being forged within the intimate, local sites of civic and community life. This shift took many forms, including changes in city leadership, new municipal institutions, and especially transformations in the built environment. Newly friendly relations between Japan and the United States also meant that Japanese Americans found fresh, if highly constrained, job and community prospects just as the city’s African Americans struggled against rising barriers. San Francisco’s story is an inherently local one, but it also a broader story of a city collectively, if not cooperatively, reimagining its place in a global economy.

Debbie Macomber calls KNIT TOGETHER the project of her heart. Whenever she speaks, her theme is simple: don't be afraid to dream. God created us for a reason, and when we come to recognize our deepest longing, we can discover His plan for our lives. Full of encouragement and divine empowerment for women, the book centers around the Bible's assurance that God knits each one of us together in our mother's womb. Debbie deftly weaves her own story throughout the book, using the knitting theme of her most recent bestsellers to create metaphors that explore God's handiwork in creating us for a purpose.

Growing up as a girl with a boy’s name, Wesley Hobbs was predestined to take the road less traveled. She spent her youth on the beautiful golf courses of Southwest Florida, and while her high school friends wanted to go to Florida colleges, she accepted a golf scholarship to Appalachian State University in the North Carolina mountains. In college, her friends wanted to date the Army ROTC boys, but she decided to join them. As an Army cadet, Wesley met a good, Christian, young man, Larry Bauguess, who stole her heart. They married during her senior year, and upon graduation, they entered the Army and served together as lieutenants and captains. They enjoyed a wonderful marriage for almost fourteen years and were blessed with two beautiful daughters. Tragedy struck in May 2007, when Larry was killed in action while serving overseas with the 82nd Airborne Division. Wesley and her daughters were at home at Fort Bragg when the notification team delivered the heartbreaking news. Wesley would learn that the lessons taught in church, the Army, and on the golf course would give her the strength to carry on. This is her story.

Get ready for takeoff. The life of the flight attendant, a.k.a., stewardess, was supposedly once one of glamour, exotic travel and sexual freedom, as recently depicted in such films as Catch Me If You Can and View From the Top. The nostalgia for the beautiful, carefree and ever helpful stewardess perhaps reveals a yearning for simpler times, but nonetheless does not square with the difficult, demanding and sometimes dangerous job of today's flight attendants. Based on interviews with over sixty flight attendants, both female and male labor leaders, and and drawing upon his observations while flying across the country and overseas, Drew Whitelegg reveals a much more complicated profession, one that in many ways is the quintessential job of the modern age where life moves at record speeds and all that is solid seems up in the air. Containing lively portraits of flight attendants, both current and retired, this book is the first to show the intimate, illuminating, funny, and sometimes dangerous behind-the-scenes stories of daily life for the flight attendant. Going behind the curtain, Whitelegg ventures into first-class, coach, the cabin, and life on call for these men and women who spend week in and week out in foreign cities, sleeping in hotel rooms miles from home. Working the Skies also elucidates the contemporary work and labor issues that confront the modern worker: the demands of full-time work and parenthood; the downsizing of corporate America and the resulting labor lockouts; decreasing wages and hours worked; job insecurity; and the emotional toll of a high stress job. Given the events of 9/11, flight attendants now have an especially poignant set of stressful concerns to manage, both for their own safety as well as for those they serve, the passengers. Flight attendants, originally registered nurses charged with attending to passengers' medical needs, now find themselves wearing the hats of therapist, security guard and undercover agent. This last set of tasks pushing some, as Whitelegg shows, out of the business altogether.

They are grave looking while commuting to their work; they are well dressed, mostly in shades of gray; they multitask to master the hyperactive pace of today, and they are tuned for success, success that is measured by the bags of money made per day. The business people of this world take themselves and their hunting for the bacon very seriously, and wasting time, laughing at themselves and useless performances are taboo.