Skip to main content

Captain Of Clippers

March 2023
1min read

What a pity your reference to the Pan American China Clipper flight of fifty years ago (“The Time Machine,” October/November 1985) failed to name the courageous pilot, Capt. Edwin C. Musick, who was the first to fly the famed Clipper ships. The anniversary on November 22 has restored Musick, dubbed the “Lindbergh of the Pacific,” to his rightful niche in the annals of aviation. Musick, since his 1935 air-mapping flights over the Pacific, was lost over Pago Pago aboard the Samoan Clipper just before World War II and after making an initial flight from the United States to New Zealand, where he is still hailed as a hero.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "April/May 1986"

Authored by: David McCullough

A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape—with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts

Authored by: Natalie A. Brooks

In a classic medical paper, Dr. Reginald Fitz identified the disease, named it, showed how to diagnose it, and prescribed an operation that would save tens of millions of lives

Authored by: Michael F. Wendland

When copper-country miners went on strike, the owners brought thugs from the slums of New York to northern Michigan. The struggle led to an event that killed a city.

Authored by: Dick Adler

Lorenzo Da Ponte, New York bookseller and Pennsylvania grocer, was a charming ne’er-do-well in the eyes of his fellow Americans. He happened, also, to have written the words for Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro .

Authored by: The Editors

On sojourns away from the studio where he labored in oils, Homer took along his watercolors and produced his freshest and most expressive work

Authored by: Gregg Merken

For forty years George Kennan and Paul Nitze, architects of our foreign policy under nine Presidents, have squared off over Russia, the atom bomb, arms control—everything except their respect and affection for each other

Authored by: Neil A. Grauer

Robert Benchley, a woebegone chronicler of his own inadequacies, was the humorist’s humorist, a man beloved by practically everyone but himself

Authored by: Lawrence B. Custer

Up until the last century in some parts of the country, a murderer’s guilt could legally be determined by what happened when he or she touched the victim’s corpse

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told about how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.