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June/july 1982 | Volume 33, Issue 4
Coming Up
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
She was the last major U.S. warship sunk during World War II, and her loss was the worst open-sea disaster in American history: 880 died. When a Japanese submarine torpedoed the heavy cruiser Indianapolis on the night of July 29, 1945, the ship went down without getting off a distress signal. Nobody knew of the survivors fighting thirst, insanity, and sharks in the terrible heat of the summer Pacific. A MERICAN H ERITAGE tells their story in all its horror and heroism.
As everyone knows, genealogy is big business today. But how did it happen that Americans abandoned their egalitarian wellsprings to establish pedigrees for themselves? Is it simple proof that everyone does indeed love a lord, or is something deeper at work? Peter Andrews provides some surprising answers in a major survey of an obsession.
To a generation of Americans, it was far more than a cartoon character. The brick-dodging feline offered amusement, consolation, and even a painless dose of poetry and metaphysics. In our pages, the major caricaturist Edward Sorel examines Krazy Kat’s continuing appeal and selects some of Herriman’s best renderings of the kreature in action.
An extraordinary interview with a great American figure, Archibald MacLeish, Emily Hahn’s delightful memoir of growing up in St. Louis, and much more, all richly illustrated.