Hidden Figures AUTHOR: Margot Lee Shetterly CATEGORY/GENRE

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TITLE: Hidden Figures AUTHOR: Margot Lee Shetterly CATEGORY/GENRE: Nonfiction/Biography SERIES: AWARDS: Winner of Anisfield-Wolf Award for Nonfiction, Winner Black Caucus of American Library Association Best Nonfiction Book, Winner NAACP Image Award Best Nonfiction Book, Winner National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine Communication Award SIMILAR BOOKS BY OTHER AUTHORS: Rise of the Rocket Girls by Nathalia Holt, The Radium Girls by Kate Moore, The Glass Universe by Dava Sobel AVAILABLE: This title is available at STC Library, in Ebook and audiobook format on Libby and Ebook and audiobook format on Hoopla. ABOUT THIS BOOK: Hidden Figures tells the stories of four African American women who blazed a trail in the fields of mathematics and engineering at NASA (originally known as NACA, National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics). During WWII NACA began hiring women to work as human computers. The women did the work of mathematicians but were hired as subprofessionals so that they could be paid less. Eventually NACA began to hire qualified black computers because the demand could not be met by white employees alone. The book focuses on the individual stories of each women and incorporates the history that coincides with the stories starting with WWII and aviation research and moving through the Cold War and the Space Race. There is particular focus on the Civil Rights Movement and school segregation. The author doesn’t let the reader forget the atmosphere of the times and all the obstacles that stood in the way of African Americans and especially African American women. The women in the book are smart, incredibly determined and worked tirelessly to produce their best work. They were critical to making improvements to the U.S. defense industry during the war and later in the U.S. efforts during the Cold War. This is a strong nonfiction read. It is dual parts biographical and, in places, a very technical read. Readers will learn a part of history that hasn’t traditionally been portrayed in the history books. YOU MIGHT LIKE THIS BOOK IF… You might like this book if you are interested in the sciences and history especially aviation and the Space Race. .

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Hidden Figures: the American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black
Hidden Figures: the American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helps Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly An account of the previously unheralded but pivotal contributions of NASA's African- American women mathematicians to America's space program describes how they were segregated from their white counterparts by Jim Crow laws in spite of their groundbreaking successes. Why you'll like it: Science writing, richly detailed, race relations, inspiring. About the Author: Margot Lee Shetterly was born in Hampton, Virginia in 1969. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. After college she worked in investment banking for several years. Her other career moves have included working in the media industry for the website Volume.com, publishing an English language magazine, Inside Mexico; marketing consultant in the Mexican tourism industry; and writing. Hidden Figures is her first book, a New York Times Bestseller and was optioned for a feature film. (Bowker Author Biography) Questions for discussion 1. Hidden Figures uncovers the story of the women whose work at NACA and NASA help shape and define U.S. space exploration. Why is their story significant to our culture, social and scientific history? 2. In what ways does the race for space parallel the civil rights movement? What kind of freedoms are being explored in each? 3. In what ways was Melvin Butler, the white personnel office at Langley, who was searching for qualified mathematicians and wound up hiring black women for jobs that historically had gone only to white men.
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MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY 46 Bridge Road Brooksville, ME 04617 [email protected] US TEL: + 1 (305) 433-8051
MARGOT LEE SHETTERLY 46 Bridge Road Brooksville, ME 04617 [email protected] www.margotleeshetterly.com US TEL: + 1 (305) 433-8051 CURRENT PROJECTS Hidden Figures , narrative nonfiction work in progress. Hidden Figures is the untold history of the African-American women employed as Human Computers by NACA/NASA from the 1940s through the 1960s. (Represented by Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency) The Human Computers Project. Multimedia platform archiving the history of NACA-NACA’s African-American Human Computers and their significance in the context of the US Space Program, the Cold War, the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle for Gender Equality. Collaborative work in progress with Prof. Duchess Harris of Macalester College. SKILLS, ACHIEVEMENTS, RECOGNITION • Expansion Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year Competition, Finalist (2009). Finalist for prestigious competition held by Mexico’s leading business journal. Nominated as a founder of Inside México Magazine. • Doing It For Ourselves (Donna Ballard, Putnam Berkeley 1997) Featured in book profiling outstanding women of color in finance and business. • Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Program . Awarded charter for completion of rigorous three-year course of study and examinations on topics related to corporate finance, investment, and portfolio managementProfiled in major US & Mexican magazines and newspapers as an entrepreneur. • More than 15 years of experience working in start-up media and technology companies • .Robust financial modeling skills • Superb oral, written, and presentation skills in English and Spanish, proficient oral and written French • Computer languages: HTML, HTML5, XML, XHTML, Javascript and Drupal, with a breadth of experience in conceiving, speccing, architecting, producing and managing online platforms MEMBERSHIP ORGANIZATIONS • Member, American Historical Association.
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Hidden Figures Light up Screen Black Women Who Helped America Win the Space Race Jenna P
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Hidden Figures 2
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This Transcript Was Exported on Jun 17, 2019 - View Latest Version Here
This transcript was exported on Jun 17, 2019 - view latest version here. Speaker 1: Major funding for Backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations. Speaker 2: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities this is Backstory with the American history guys. Brian: Hey, Backstory listeners. 'Tis the season for going to the movies. There are a lot of great films coming out this time of year, but one film in particular caught our eye. Hidden Figures, which is playing in theaters this holiday season. Speaker 4: You have identification on you? Speaker 5: We're just on our way to work at NASA, sir. Speaker 4: I had no idea they hired. Speaker 6: There are quite a few women working in the space program. Brian: It's a story of black women mathematicians who played a critical role at NASA at the height of the space race, and it's based on a book written by a friend mine Margot Lee Shetterly. Margot welcome to Backstory. Margot Lee S.: Hey, Brian. It's awesome to be here on Backstory with you. Brian: Before we dive into this story that your book tells I want you to give us a quick version of what we'll see in the movie. Margot Lee S.: You know, the people of the movie, who produced the movie, came up with a tagline. Something like this: The people behind the story you know. That's really what it is.
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Margot Lee Shetterly. Hidden Figures: the American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
International Journal of Business and Social Science Vol. 8, No. 3; March 2017 Book Review Margot Lee Shetterly. Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. New York: William Morrow, 2016. 349 pp. Paper $15.99. A. Scott Henderson Furman University Greenville SC USA Historically, gender norms prevented the vast majority of women from pursuing careers in science or mathematics. Even women who were exceptions to this rule have seldom been given their due by scholars. Margot Lee Shetterly, an independent researcher, goes a long way in rectifying this neglect. She has produced a compelling examination of an unsung group of black women who were recruited during and immediately after World War II to be computers at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory in Hampton, Virginia, a federal instillation that played a significant role in America’s space program. “Computers” seems like an awkward term, but it is entirely accurate: people, not machines, had to perform arduous calculations prior to the 1960s. Shetterly focuses on four such individuals: Christine Mann Darden, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Dorothy Vaughan. Shetterly interweaves their lives, moving back and forth in time, to illustrate the social, political, and legal factors that both encouraged and hindered the aspirations of black women in mid-twentieth-century America. However enlightened the federal government might have been in its willingness to hire African Americans as mathematicians and engineers, it adhered to prevailing racial arrangements, especially in the South. For example, Langley’s black computers not only had to use separate bathrooms and sit at designated tables in the cafeteria, but they also had to work in a separate building.
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