Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
June/July 1986 | Volume 37, Issue 4
Coming Up
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
“The Hump” was the GI name for the Himalayas, and during World War II American pilots flogged balky cargo planes across them from India to supply the Chinese armies fighting Japan. Hump pilots bucked some of the world’s worst weather, faced being eaten by tigers when they survived being shot down by Zeroes, and never forgot any of it. Richard Rhodes attended one of their reunions and gathered a pack of terrifying, hilarious, astonishing tales that are the collective memory of the Hump.
We tend to think of the opium trade as being a British outrage, when English merchants, protected by English bayonets, made vast profits by turning China into a nation of drug addicts. But in fact, Americans were very much a part of the odious traffic, and in a surprising article, Geoffrey C. Ward charts the course of the American opium trade through the career of an eager young merchant named Warren Delano. Delano never talked about it afterward, of course; and neither did his grandson, Franklin Roosevelt.
Never mind that there may be more money in pro football—baseball is the national pastime, and always will be. Why? Because it is mirror and beacon to every aspect of our civilization. Elting E. Morison’s at bat.
Today, when our economic fortunes are so clearly entwined with the world’s, it is useful to remember that the worst economic catastrophe of the century didn’t just happen to America. John A. Garraty shows how the rest of the world coped with the disaster that rolled over us in 1929.
a superb and tormented architect nobody remembers … the indefatigable Fuller Brush Man turns eighty … newly discovered facts about the American Indian … and, with imperial largesse, even more.