Hidden Figures
Subtitle: the untold true story of four African-American women who helped launch our nation into space
By: Margot Lee Shetterly
Contributors: Lee Shetterly, Margot
Edition: Young readers' edition. First edition.
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 231
ISBN-13: 9780062662385
Subjects: Officials and employees; Women mathematicians; Space race; United States; African American mathematicians; United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration; African American women; United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration; African Americans; Juvenile literature; Biography; Women
Description: Before John Glenn orbited the Earth or Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a group of professionals worked as "Human Computers," calculating the flight paths that would enable these historic achievements. Among these were a coterie of bright, talented African-American women. Segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws, these "colored computers," as they were known, used slide rules, adding machines, and pencil and paper to support America's fledgling aeronautics industry, and helped write the equations that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space. Drawing on the oral histories of scores of these "computers," personal recollections, interviews with NASA executives and engineers, archival documents, correspondence, and reporting from the era, Hidden Figures recalls America's greatest adventure and NASA's groundbreaking successes through the experiences of five spunky, courageous, intelligent, determined, and patriotic women: Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, Christine Darden, and Gloria Champine. Moving from World War II through NASA's golden age, touching on the civil rights era, the Space Race, the Cold War, and the women's rights movement, Hidden Figures interweaves a history of scientific achievement and technological innovation with the intimate stories of five women whose work forever changed the world -- and whose lives show how out of one of America's most painful histories came one of its proudest moments.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-218) and index.

Ages 8-12.
Table of contents: title: Setting the scene; title: A door opens; title: Mobilization; title: A new Beginning; title: The double V; title: The "colored" computers; title: War birds; title: The duration; title: Breaking barriers; title: No limits; title: The area rule; title: An exceptional mind; title: Turbulence; title: Progress; title: Young, gifted, and black; title: What a difference a day makes; title: Writing the textbook on space; title: With all deliberate speed; title: Model behavior; title: Degrees of freedom; title: Out of the past, the future; title: America is for everybody; title: One small step.