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A new edition of a classic work of history, revealing the anti-homosexual purges of midcentury Washington. In The Lavender Scare, David K. Johnson tells the frightening story of how, during the Cold War, homosexuals were considered as dangerous a threat to national security as Communists. Charges that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations were havens for homosexuals proved a potent political weapon, sparking a “Lavender Scare” more vehement and long-lasting than Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. Drawing on declassified documents, years of research in the records of the National Archives and the FBI, and interviews with former civil servants, Johnson recreates the vibrant gay subculture that flourished in midcentury Washington and takes us inside the security interrogation rooms where anti-homosexual purges ruined the lives and careers of thousands of Americans. This enlarged edition of Johnson’s classic work of history—the winner of numerous awards and the basis for an acclaimed documentary broadcast on PBS—features a new epilogue, bringing the still-relevant story into the twenty-first century.
The American West of the 1930s and 1940s was still a place of prospectors, cowboys, ranchers, and mountaineers, one that demanded backbreaking, lonely, and dangerous work. Still, midcentury pioneers such as David Lavender remembered ?not the cold and the cruel fatigue, but rather the multitude of tiny things which in their sum make up the elemental poetry of rock and ice and snow.? And as the nation exhausted its gold and silver veins, as law reached the boomtowns on the frontier, and as the era of the great cattle ranches and drives came to an end, Lavender felt compelled to document his experiences in rugged southwest Colorado to preserve this rapidly disappearing way of life. One Man?s We...
Bent's Fort was a landmark of the American frontier, a huge private fort on the upper Arkansas River in present southeastern Colorado. Established by the adventurers Charles and William Bent, it stood until 1849 as the center of the Indian trade of the central plains. David Lavender's chronicle of these men and their part in the opening of the West has been conceded a place beside the works of Parkman and Prescott.
An oft-told story from different perspectives, the history of the American fur trade is here placed within the overall rivalry for empire between Britain and the United States. David Lavender focuses on men such as John Jacob Astor and Ramsay Crooks who learned to exploit the needs and wants of Indian tribes to gain a superior economic position over the British and made fur trading an integral economic activity in early U.S. history. Maps.
Originally published: New York: Harper & Row, c1988.
?In one very real sense,? David Lavender writes, ?the story of the Oregon Trail begins with Columbus.? This opening suggests the panoramic sweep of his history of that famous trail. In chiseled, colorful prose, Lavender illustrates the ?westward vision? that impelled the early explorers of the American interior looking for a northwest passage and send fur trappers into the region charted by Lewis and Clark. For the emigrants following the trappers? routes, that vision gradually grew into a sense of a manifest American destiny. ø Lavender describes the efforts of emigration societies, of missionaries like Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, and of early pioneer settlers like Hall Jackson Kelley, Jason Lee, and Thomas Jefferson Farnham, as well as the routes they took to the ?Promised Land.? He concludes by recounting the first large-scale emigrations of 1843?45, which steeled the U. S. government for war with Mexico and agreements with Britain over the Oregon boundary. ø
A historical and cultural overview, including discussions of present-day racial, conservation, and economic problems.
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SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY AWARD David Aaronovitch grew up in Communist Great Britain – a Britain hidden from view for most, but for those on the inside it was a life filled with picket lines, militant trade unions, solidarity rallies for foreign Communists, the Red Army Choir, copies of the Daily Worker, all underpinned by a quiet love of the Soviet Union. In this idiosyncratic blend of memoir, history and biography, David Aaronovitch uncovers the story of his family’s life by picking through letters, diaries and secret service files, which in turn unleash vivid childhood memories of a lost and idealistic world. Party Animals is about personal life and political life becoming tragically intertwined, and one family’s search for meaning in the twentieth century.
Discusses three 16th century explorers of America who came from Spain and Portugal. Also provides information about the national monuments named after the explorers.