"Americans in a World at War:
Intimate Histories from the Crash of Pan Am’s Yankee Clipper”
with Brooke L. Blower

 

On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways’ celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York’s Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Brooke L. Blower talks about her work, reconstructing the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane—their personal histories, their diverse New Deal-era politics and how their wartime movements shed new light on Americans’ road to World War II.