Professor Blower Receives Public Scholars Grant from National Endowment for the Humanities
Professor Brooke Blower is a recipient of the Public Scholars grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for her project “American World Wars: Intimate Histories from the Crash of the Yankee Clipper.” The Public Scholars program supports the creation of well-researched nonfiction books in the humanities written for the broad public. Professor Blower’s project is one of 25 awarded this cycle.
“These challenging times underscore how important the humanities are to making American culture and world history relatable across generations,” said NEH Chairman Jon Parrish Peede of the year’s awards. “NEH is proud to award hundreds of grants to keep our nation’s scholars, students, teachers, and citizens moving forward in pursuit of new knowledge and understanding.”
Professor Blower’s grant is in support of her work completing book on the cultural, social, and political dimensions of World War II as seen through the lives of seven passengers aboard the Pan American Airways Yankee Clipper when it crashed in 1943. She writes,
Combat GIs dominate studies of Americans abroad during World War II. But they constituted only a fraction of the millions of Americans stationed on six continents, in and out of uniform, during the global crisis. “American World Wars” tells a panoramic story of seven worldly noncombatants, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them to all board the same Pan Am boat plane bound for Lisbon in February 1943. When the Yankee Clipper crashed in the Tagus River, it took five of their lives but left a paper trail that leads to a richer, deeper understanding of the cross-cutting political and ideological dimensions of Americans’ war efforts.
The book, which is under contract with Oxford University Press, draws on sources from more than a dozen archives in the United States and abroad.