In 1983, during the heart of the Cold War era, the government has failed to stop the powerful Brotherhood, whose goal is a New World Order. Josh Davenport, G-2 agent and spy, has been recruited by the President to stop the Brotherhood from taking control of the United States. Six years ago when Davenport’s cover was blown, he disappeared and was presumed dead. In an effort to force him into the open, the Brotherhood kidnaps his daughters and grandchildren, and Davenport comes back from the dead with a vengeance. In a gripping action-packed spy thriller, suspense builds as Davenport’s new mission takes him from Scotland to Texas to a ghost town in Arizona’s Superstition Mountains. It’s a race against time as Davenport fights to save his family from the Brotherhood’s sadistic killer and stop the takeover. But, can he live long enough to do this? Caught in a whirlwind of conspiracy and espionage, there has never been a time when Davenport could resign. Deep in his heart, what he really wants is to go home to his family, but he knows that just a dream.
The fascinating—and eerily timely—tale of the forgotten Depression-era psychologists who launched the modern science of childhood development. “Doomed from birth” was how psychologist Harold Skeels described two toddler girls at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in Davenport, Iowa, in 1934. Their IQ scores, added together, totaled just 81. Following prevailing eugenic beliefs of the times, Skeels and his colleague Marie Skodak assumed that the girls had inherited their parents’ low intelligence and were therefore unfit for adoption. The girls were sent to an institution for the “feebleminded” to be cared for by “moron” women. To Skeels and Skodak’s astonishment, under the women’s care, the children’s IQ scores became normal. Now considered one of the most important scientific findings of the twentieth century, the discovery that environment shapes children’s intelligence was also one of the most fiercely contested—and its origin story has never been told. In The Orphans of Davenport, psychologist and esteemed historian Marilyn Brookwood chronicles how a band of young psychologists in 1930s Iowa shattered the nature-versus-nurture debate and overthrew long-accepted racist and classist views of childhood development. Transporting readers to a rural Iowa devastated by dust storms and economic collapse, Brookwood reveals just how profoundly unlikely it was for this breakthrough to come from the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. Funded by the University of Iowa and the Rockefeller Foundation, and modeled on America’s experimental agricultural stations, the Iowa Station was virtually unknown, a backwater compared to the renowned psychology faculties of Stanford, Harvard, and Princeton. Despite the challenges they faced, the Iowa psychologists replicated increased intelligence in thirteen more “retarded” children. When Skeels published their incredible work, America’s leading psychologists—eugenicists all—attacked and condemned his conclusions. The loudest critic was Lewis M. Terman, who advocated for forced sterilization of low-intelligence women and whose own widely accepted IQ test was threatened by the Iowa research. Terman and his opponents insisted that intelligence was hereditary, and their prestige ensured that the research would be ignored for decades. Remarkably, it was not until the 1960s that a new generation of psychologists accepted environment’s role in intelligence and helped launch the modern field of developmental neuroscience.. Drawing on prodigious archival research, Brookwood reclaims the Iowa researchers as intrepid heroes and movingly recounts the stories of the orphans themselves, many of whom later credited the psychologists with giving them the opportunity to forge successful lives. A radiant story of the power and promise of science to better the lives of us all, The Orphans of Davenport unearths an essential history at a moment when race science is dangerously resurgent.
In 1983, during the heart of the Cold War era, the government has failed to stop the powerful Brotherhood, whose goal is a New World Order. Josh Davenport, G-2 agent and spy, has been recruited by the President to stop the Brotherhood from taking control of the United States. Six years ago when Davenport's cover was blown, he disappeared and was presumed dead. In an effort to force him into the open, the Brotherhood kidnaps his daughters and grandchildren, and Davenport comes back from the dead with a vengeance. In a gripping action-packed spy thriller, suspense builds as Davenport's new mission takes him from Scotland to Texas to a ghost town in Arizona's Superstition Mountains. It's a race against time as Davenport fights to save his family from the Brotherhood's sadistic killer and stop the takeover. But, can he live long enough to do this? Caught in a whirlwind of conspiracy and espionage, there has never been a time when Davenport could resign. Deep in his heart, what he really wants is to go home to his family, but he know's that just a dream.
Raised in the gritty Mississippi River town of Davenport, Iowa, Cora Keck could have walked straight out of a Susan Glaspell story. When Cora was sent to Vassar College in the fall of 1884, she was a typical unmotivated, newly rich party girl. Her improbable educational opportunity at “the first great educational institution for womankind” turned into an enthralling journey of self-discovery as she struggled to meet the high standards in Vassar’s School of Music while trying to shed her reputation as the daughter of a notorious quack and self-made millionaire: Mrs. Dr. Rebecca J. Keck, second only to Lydia Pinkham as America’s most successful self-made female patent medicine entrepreneur of the time. This lively, stereotype-shattering story might have been lost, had Cora’s great-granddaughter, Greta Nettleton, not decided to go through some old family trunks instead of discarding most of the contents unexamined. Inside she discovered a rich cache of Cora’s college memorabilia—essential complements to her 1885 diary, which Nettleton had already begun to read. The Quack’s Daughter details Cora’s youthful travails and adventures during a time of great social and economic transformation. From her working-class childhood to her gilded youth and her later married life, Cora experienced triumphs and disappointments as a gifted concert pianist that the reader will recognize as tied to the limited opportunities open to women at the turn of the twentieth century, as well as to the dangerous consequences for those who challenged social norms. Set in an era of surging wealth torn by political controversy over inequality and women’s rights and widespread panic about domestic terrorists, The Quack’s Daughter is illustrated with over a hundred original images and photographs that illuminate the life of a spirited and charming heroine who ultimately faced a stark life-and-death crisis that would force her to re-examine her doubts about her mother’s medical integrity.
Josh Davenport is a former Army G-2 intelligence officer sent deep undercover to infiltrate The Brotherhood, a terrorist group whose goal is a New World Order under their sole control. Davenport is the only one standing between them and the political takeover of America. However, his cover is blown, and The Brotherhood orders his termination.
