1001 People Who Made America - Alan Axelrod [74]
La Salle, René-Robert Cavalier, Sieur de (1643–1687) La Salle led the French exploration of the vast region watered by the Mississippi River and its many tributaries, claiming the territory for Louis XIV of France and christening it Louisiana. It was North America’s most fertile land. La Salle’s final expedition, dedicated to conquering part of Spanish Mexico with a handful of Frenchman and allied Indians, ended in mutiny—and his death at the hands of his own men.
Las Casas, Bartolomé de (1474–1566) A Dominican friar, Las Casas was for 12 years part of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, but was outraged by the conquistadors’ inhumanity and wrote several gripping accounts of atrocities and other abuses committed against native peoples in the Caribbean and in North and South America. He was thus both an eyewitness-historian of early American exploration and settlement and a pioneering crusader for human rights.
Latrobe, Benjamin (1764–1820) Born in Britain, Latrobe studied architecture in Europe before immigrating to the United States in 1795. He established himself as the nation’s first professional architect and, in effect, founded the profession of architecture in the United States. He introduced the Greek Revival style to the nation with designs for many public and government buildings. President Thomas Jefferson appointed him surveyor of public buildings in 1803 and Latrobe completed the original U.S. Capitol, among other buildings. His best-known work, however, was for the Basilica of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a part of Baltimore’s Roman Catholic cathedral.
Lawrence, Ernest (1901–1958) As early as 1929, this brilliant and charismatic physicist drew up designs for a cyclotron, which would accelerate hydrogen ions (protons) to create nuclear disintegration—that is, to “split atoms”—thereby producing new elements. The technology was essential to advanced nuclear research, and, during World War II, it proved to be critically important to the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic bomb. Lawrence developed an electromagnetic process for separating uranium-235 to produce the fissionable material at the heart of the weapon. A man of many interests, Lawrence also patented a picture tube for color television. He was awarded the 1939 Nobel Prize in physics, and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory at Livermore, California, are named in his honor, as is element 103, lawrencium.
Lay, Kenneth (1942–2006) Lay was an American success story, rising from a poor Missouri family to build a Texas oil pipeline company into a new kind of business, an energy broker called Enron. The meteoric rise of this firm made Lay one of the nation’s top-paid executives ($42.4 million earned in 1999) and an influential political figure; however, as a massive accounting scandal came to light in 2001—revealing that Enron’s soaring profits were pure fiction—Lay’s Enron became shorthand for corporate greed and conscienceless corruption. Lay pleaded ignorance of wrongdoing throughout his company, but was nevertheless indicted on July 7, 2004 on 11 counts of securities fraud and related charges. Convicted on 10 counts on May 25, 2006, he died—of an apparent heart attack—on July 5, 2006, somewhat more than three months before his scheduled sentencing.
Leary, Timothy (1920–1996) Leary was a Harvard University psychology professor who founded the Harvard Psychedelic Drug Research Program and administered psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) to graduate students. Dismissed from Harvard in 1963, he moved into a mansion in Millbrook, New York, where he presided over a small community of experimenters with the psychedelic drug LSD. He claimed that the drug enabled a spiritual “mind-expanding” state superior to anything contemporary conventional American society had to offer, and he advised his large lecture