The Secret City

Download or read book Secret City written by James Kirchick and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 Named one of Vanity Fair's “Best Books of 2022” “Not since Robert Caro’s Years of Lyndon Johnson have I been so riveted by a work of history. Secret City is not gay history. It is American history.” —George Stephanopoulos Washington, D.C., has always been a city of secrets. Few have been more dramatic than the ones revealed in James Kirchick’s Secret City. For decades, the specter of homosexuality haunted Washington. The mere suggestion that a person might be gay destroyed reputations, ended careers, and ruined lives. At the height of the Cold War, fear of homosexuality became intertwined with the growing threat of international communism, leading to a purge of gay men and lesbians from the federal government. In the fevered atmosphere of political Washington, the secret “too loathsome to mention” held enormous, terrifying power. Utilizing thousands of pages of declassified documents, interviews with over one hundred people, and material unearthed from presidential libraries and archives around the country, Secret City is a chronicle of American politics like no other. Beginning with the tragic story of Sumner Welles, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s brilliant diplomatic advisor and the man at the center of “the greatest national scandal since the existence of the United States,” James Kirchick illuminates how homosexuality shaped each successive presidential administration through the end of the twentieth century. Cultural and political anxiety over gay people sparked a decades-long witch hunt, impacting everything from the rivalry between the CIA and the FBI to the ascent of Joseph McCarthy, the struggle for Black civil rights, and the rise of the conservative movement. Among other revelations, Kirchick tells of the World War II–era gay spymaster who pioneered seduction as a tool of American espionage, the devoted aide whom Lyndon Johnson treated as a son yet abandoned once his homosexuality was discovered, and how allegations of a “homosexual ring” controlling Ronald Reagan nearly derailed his 1980 election victory. Magisterial in scope and intimate in detail, Secret City will forever transform our understanding of American history.

Download or read book The Secret City written by C.J. Daugherty and published by Bookouture. This book was released on 2016-09-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Secret City written by Chris Archer and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2003-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When George van Gelder finds an old treasure map in his attic, he knows he's onto something. His house was built by the notorious Captain Kidd, the pirate whose stolen treasure has been lost for centuries. Includes a collectible card. Consumable.

Download or read book The Secret City written by Fred Goodman and published by Broadway. This book was released on 2004 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the spirit of Joseph Mitchell and E. L. Doctorow, a haunting and genre-defying portrait gallery of once-eminent, now half-forgotten New Yorkers buried in the city's largest cemetery Woodlawn Cemetery is a massive necropolis, four hundred immaculately and privately maintained acres in the north Bronx that serve as the final resting place for three hundred thousand New Yorkers. It is a place of startling serenity and architectural distinction as well as cultural and historical significance that nonetheless remains unknown to the majority of people who live in the city. Which is surprising when one learns that its (very) long-term inhabitants include Herman Melville, Duke Ellington, Robert Moses, Fiorello La Guardia, Miles Davis, and dozens of Gilded Age grandeesincluding Goulds and Astorswho were determined to spend eternity with opulence to match their residences while alive. Writer Fred Goodman stumbled upon Woodlawn one day when he wandered off his bicycling path.The Secret Cityis the product of his frankly obsessive researches into the lives of many of the once famed, now forgotten men and women buried there. Featuring nine dramatic episodes, chronologically arranged, each story presents an exceptional individual caught up in a defining or historical moment of New York's social, political, commercial, or artistic life. Readers meet phrenologist and publisher Orson Fowler, ASPCA founder Henry Bergh, Gilded Age railroad magnate Austin Corbin, political satirist Finley Peter Dunne, "Boy Mayor" John Purroy Mitchel, attorney Francis Garvan, sculptor Attilio Piccirilli, Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, leftist East Harlem Congressman Vito Marcantonio, and pioneering aviatrix Ruth Nichols. Framing and tying together these novelistic tales is the first-person narrative of the author's discovery of Woodlawn and his research.The Secret Cityis, then, an act of resurrectiona way of putting flesh on the anonymous dead, and humanizing and demystifying a city whose fabulous history is, too often, interred with its inhabitants.

Download or read book The Girls of Atomic City written by Denise Kiernan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-03-11 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the story of the young women of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, who unwittingly played a crucial role in one of the most significant moments in U.S. history. The Tennessee town of Oak Ridge was created from scratch in 1942. One of the Manhattan Project's secret cities. All knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb "Little Boy" was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The reverberations from their work there, work they did not fully understand at the time, are still being felt today.

Download or read book Secret City written by Constance McLaughlin Green and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-08 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The efforts of Washington's Negro community to establish unity within itself, and to win recognition from white Washingtonians- and conversely, the efforts of a minority of white Washingtonians to effect an understanding with the Negroes-make this a fascinating story. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Download or read book 109 East Palace written by Jennet Conant and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-11-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of Tuxedo Park, the extraordinary story of the thousands of people who were sequestered in a military facility in the desert for twenty-seven intense months under J. Robert Oppenheimer where the world's best scientists raced to invent the atomic bomb and win World War II. In 1943, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the brilliant, charismatic head of the Manhattan Project, recruited scientists to live as virtual prisoners of the U.S. government at Los Alamos, a barren mesa thirty-five miles outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thousands of men, women, and children spent the war years sequestered in this top-secret military facility. They lied to friends and family about where they were going and what they were doing, and then disappeared into the desert. Through the eyes of a young Santa Fe widow who was one of Oppenheimer's first recruits, we see how, for all his flaws, he developed into an inspiring leader and motivated all those involved in the Los Alamos project to make a supreme effort and achieve the unthinkable.