Before the US became a superpower, they had to learn languages, they had to collaborate and compromise with other people. “Americans were abroad, they were curious. But the problem with that perspective is that it suggests Americans were not in the world in really dramatic and complex ways before World War II,” says Blower, who is also the author of Becoming Americans in Paris: Transatlantic Politics and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford University Press, 2011). “There’s an assumption in many popular narratives that Americans were minding their own business, that they were the war’s reluctant heroes. Along the way, she busts a bunch of sepia-tinged myths, starting with America’s pre–Pearl Harbor isolationism. Blower divides her narrative into four parts-World War I and its aftermath, two decades of relative peace, the start of World War II, and the year before the crash-breaking each with a short interlude to plot the Yankee Clipper’s fateful journey. The book charts their lives from the start of the Great War in 1914 on, weaving their personal histories into the world’s slide from one conflagration to another. In Americans in a World at War, Blower picks six globally connected passengers-including Spiegelberg, Diaz, and Robertson, plus pilot Sullivan-to focus on. Eisenhower’s staff or Manuel Diaz Riestra, a Spanish-born immigrant and self-made shipping magnate or Benjamin Franklin Robertson, Jr., author and New York Herald Tribune reporter. Like Major George Alfred Spiegelberg, a lawyer and member of General Dwight D. To get on a transatlantic flight 80 years ago, you had to be somebody. With war raging across the globe, it took serious cash or influence to land a seat on the plane. Newsreel footage celebrates the Yankee Clipper’s first transatlantic flight in March 1939. That same trip on a Boeing 314 back in 1943 meant layovers in Bermuda and the Azores-the total flight time was about 27 hours-and would have set passengers back the modern-day equivalent of thousands of dollars. A single flight from New York to Lisbon-the final destination of the doomed Yankee Clipper-costs about $350 and takes less than seven hours, without any stops. This summer, more than 112,000 flights were scheduled to zip passengers across the Atlantic from the United States. “It’s a Casablanca World War II story rather than a Saving Private Ryan story.” Curious, Globally Engaged Americansįlying to Europe today is a breeze. “This is an attempt to help readers see the war in a new way, to remind them of the geographical, temporal, and political scope of the engagements Americans were involved with. “Since around the 1980s, Americans have really whittled down their depictions of World War II to focus overwhelmingly on combat soldiers storming beaches or Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt-the high diplomacy,” says Blower, a BU College of Arts & Sciences associate professor of history and recipient of the University’s 2018 Metcalf Cup & Prize. Blower says she wanted to tell “a Casablanca World War II story rather than a Saving Private Ryan story.” Photo by Cydney Scott But the book is about more than one deadly incident: it’s a story of the intricate ways Americans were shaping-and shaped by-World War II, even before the United States officially entered the conflict.īU historian Brooke L. Blower recounts the tragedy of flight PA9035 and the lives of those on board. In her new book, Americans in a World at War: Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper (Oxford University Press, 2023), Boston University historian Brooke L. Of the 39 passengers and crew on board, only 15 would survive. After 10 excruciating minutes lying partially submerged, the Yankee Clipper-the plane that inaugurated scheduled transatlantic passenger flights, that had been christened by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt just four years earlier-sinks below the surface. As it edges lower, the left wing tip hits the water, flinging the Boeing 314 into the Tagus. It will be the plane’s last controlled movement. Courtesy of Oxford University PressĬoming in at 135 knots and at about 500 or so feet above the surface of the river, the Yankee Clipper begins a banking, descending turn. Americans in a World at War recounts the lives of seven of those on board the doomed Yankee Clipper.
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