Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race
    Ebook63 pages43 minutes

    Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

    By Goldmine Reads

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    This book summary is created for individuals who want to flesh out the important contents and are too busy to go through the entire original book. This book is not intended to replace the original book.

    In Hidden Figures, Margot Lee Shetterly reveals the real-life stories of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden — the black women of NASA who braved the insurmountable and conquered the impossible.

    Even with Virginia's Jim Crow imposing segregation laws, these four African-American women defied the odds against both racial discrimination and gender bias. They were among Langley's all-black "West Computing", a group of women who proved invaluable in the pursuit of both the triumph over the Soviet Union and America's dominion on the race to the heavens.

    Behind John Glenn's orbital flight and Neil Armstrong's iconic moonwalk were these exceptional "human computers". Armed with slide rules, papers, and pencils, they created satellite, rocket, and airplane designs and helped guarantee the nation's victory in World War II, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Space Race.

    Margot Lee Shetterly's Hidden Figures is a three-decade  chronicle of the intertwining lives of the four women as they formed friendships, fought for equality, rose above obstacles, and transformed their lives as well as America's future.

    Wait no more, take action and get this book now!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoldmine Reads
    Release dateJun 6, 2018
    ISBN9781540171221
    Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race

    Read more from Goldmine Reads

    Related to Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People

    Related ebooks

    History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Rocket Woman Katherine Johnson

      Nov 3, 2022

      Rocket Woman Katherine Johnson
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Woman the Mercury Astronauts Couldn’t Do Without: Katherine Johnson negotiated the dynamics of both race and space.

      Dec 1, 2016

      It had always been Katherine Goble’s great talent to be in the right place at the right time. In August 1952, 12 years after leaving graduate school to have her first child, that right place was in Marion, Virginia, at the wedding of her husband, Jim

      23 min read

    • Article

      The Death Of An Adjunct

      Apr 8, 2019

      The Death Of An Adjunct
      12 min read

    • Article

      The PATH To The MOON

      Jul 1, 2019

      The PATH To The MOON
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Life Of A 'Civil Rights Queen'

      Feb 3, 2022

      Constance Baker Motley's life—as a lawyer, as a politician and the first Black woman appointed to the Federal bench – is outlined in a new biography by author Tomiko Brown-Nagin: Civil Rights Queen.

      6 min read

    • Article

      Becoming Jane Crow

      Dec 14, 2021

      Becoming Jane Crow
      11 min read

    • Article

      The High Cost Of Not Knowing

      Feb 6, 2019

      The most dangerous place for black people to live is in white people's imagination. So says comedian D.L. Hughley. And surely Tamir Rice and Trayvon Martin would concur if they were alive to do so. But if white people's imagination is the most danger

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lgbtq+ Legacies

      Mar 21, 2024

      Lgbtq+ Legacies
      5 min read

    • Article

      The 10 Best Nonfiction Books

      Dec 19, 2016

      1. March: Book Three By John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell Congressman Lewis concludes his trilogy of graphic memoir with this volume about his civil rights activism. The comic book, which won the National Book Award for young people’s litera

      3 min read

    • Article

      Q&A

      May 13, 2021

      Q&A
      3 min read

    • Article

      Spotlight On…

      Jan 19, 2023

      Trailblazing attorney Pauli Murray devoted her legal career to tackling racial and gender discrimination in the US. But what drove the civil rights icon and LGBTQ+ pioneer to take up the fight in the first place? When Pauli Murray attempted to enrol

      3 min read

    • Article

      Leonard Pitts Jr.: Dear Jared Kushner

      Oct 28, 2020

      Dear Jared Kushner: So I see where you think you’ve figured out what’s wrong with Black people. Monday, you shared it on Fox “News.” ”One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community,” you said, “which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’

      2 min read

    • Article

      Leonard Pitts Jr.: Dear Jared Kushner

      Oct 28, 2020

      Dear Jared Kushner: So I see where you think you’ve figured out what’s wrong with Black people. Monday, you shared it on Fox “News.” ”One thing we’ve seen in a lot of the Black community,” you said, “which is mostly Democrat, is that President Trump’

      2 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Hidden Figures - Summarized for Busy People - Goldmine Reads

      Book Summary and Introduction

      Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the African-American Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, written by Margot Lee Shetterly, was published in 2016. It is the untold story of the four great African-American women who worked on aeronautics at the Langley labs and who, later on, proved to be essential in putting America in the forefront of the race to the stars. The story tells the lives of Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Goble — who later became known as Katherine Johnson — and Christine Mann Darden — who came after the founding of NASA. Their journeys first began while the Langley laboratories at Newport News were still under the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and when the term computer referred not a machine, but to a woman who did the complicated calculations required to evaluate the given data and confirm its results.

      In the heat of the Second World War, the human workforce was considered such a scarce resource. Men were shipped off to war, and so the Langley laboratories in Virginia — which by then was segregated — were in demand of computing capability. To fill in this capacity, an Executive Order to employ black women as well was produced. Colored women who once taught school physics and mathematics were recruited and were assigned on the west side of the compound. The segregated computing group was called West Computing — East Computing, on the other hand, was for the whites. The book follows the careers of some women in the West Computing as they battle both sexual and racial prejudice, aspiring to be recognized as equal to their white, male colleagues in mathematics and engineering.

      These women helped design the famed B-29 Superfortress and its guided missiles in the course of World War II. Postwar, Langley joined in the newly founded NASA for the quest to reach space. This is when all the computers helped send the first man — an American — to the Moon. Best known of the four women is Katherine Johnson who calculated and double-checked the numbers for trajectory produced by an electronic computer for the primary manned orbital mission. Johnson also computed the rendezvous of the lunar lander whose orbiter will be used to bring Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, and Neil Armstrong back on land.

      Shetterly also notes the milestones in the struggle for equal rights and emphasizes how they affected the colored geniuses of Langley.

      Prologue

      Margot Lee Shetterly states that the idea behind the book came from her father's casual remark after seeing a friend of the family. Even though she grew up around people from NASA as her own father worked there, she never thought about the colored women and men behind the greatest moments in the history of Space Race. Shetterly began to research on the subject, and she found it hard to settle on only one from over fifty colored women. Eventually, she decided to delve into the origins and selected a few: the colored, female computers of Langley's West Computing.

      Chapter 1: A Door Opens

      It was in 1943 when Executive Order 8802 was implemented and the defense industry was ordered to ban discrimination, which gave way to the employment of colored people. The Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory began recruiting black women to fill some of a hundred open positions as Assistant Computer. A request for additional personnel to support the country's war efforts found its way to the desk of one Personnel Officer named Melvin Butler. This was the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory during 1943: short of a

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1