In 1844 the USS Yorktown sailed from New York, as part of the U.S. Navy's newly established African Squadron, to interdict slave ships leaving the African coast. Aboard the sloop of war, Master's Mate John C. Lawrence, an educated New Yorker in his early twenties, kept a private journal describing what happened during the extraordinary two-year voyage and his reactions ...
Never in the history of aviation was there a more exciting and colorful period of rapid development and public romance with aviators and their magnificent flying machines than the decades between the world wars. It was a time of air shows and races, record flights across the oceans and over the poles, phenomenal technological innovations, and daredevil pilots with whom ...