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June/July 1980
13 years ago By admin
Volume31Issue4
In an exclusive interview with former AMERICAN HERITAGE editor Robert Gallagher, “the stranger everyone knows” talks vividly about a career that has spanned more than sixty years, includes fifty-six books and thousands of radio broadcasts, and has taken Thomas to almost every region on earth. Now in his ninth decade, has he decided to slow down? Not a bit of it. “What I would really like to do,” he says, “is visit an inhabited planet, similar to our own. …”
Fifty years ago, the first great champion of American golf won the Grand Slam—the British Amateur, the British Open, the U.S. Open, and the U.S. Amateur—which no one had ever done before and no one is likely to do again. Red Smith, the dean of American sportswriters, offers a lively account of Jones’s career and the history of his game in this country.
It was 1903, the thirteenth challenge in the history of the America’s Cup race, and the yachts were the largest the contest had ever seen—the British Shamrock III at 134 feet versus the American Reliance at 143 feet and carrying the greatest cloud of canvas ever spread on a single-masted yacht. The Reliance won, and in a stunning collection of action photographs, we show you how.
Joseph Kastner on the social history of a great American native—corn; Anthony Brandt on the course of literacy in the United States; Frederick Turner on the singular island of Grande Terre; newly discovered battle drawings of the Civil War; and much more, all of it profusely illustrated.