Top Highlights

• Others charged that the materialism of the American space program would forever ruin the wonder and beautiful ethereal qualities of the mysterious Moon, enveloped from time immemorial in legend. After human explorers violated the Moon with footprints and digging tools, who again could ever find romance in poet John Keats’s question, “What is there ...
• Even those who came to the launch to protest could not help but be deeply moved. Reverend Ralph Abernathy, successor to the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and de facto leader of the American civil rights movement, marched with four mules and about 150 members of the Poor People’s Campaign for...
• By the sixteenth century, Armstrongs were unquestionably the Borders’ most robust family of reivers—a fanciful name for bandits and robbers. Decades’ worth of flagrant expansion by the Armstrongs into what had come to be known as “the Debatable Land” eventually forced the royal hand, as did their purported crimes of burning down fifty-two Scottish ...
• The year 1968 had been extraordinarily traumatic for America, not that 1967 had been much better. The paroxysms started in January 1968 when North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, claiming the American ship had violated its territorial waters while spying. (When it was seized, the ship was off Wonsan, the port city that Armstrong knew well from his mon...
• “I don’t have the numbers. Probably it would be a matter of a couple of days.” It was such seemingly passionless answers to questions about the human dimensions of spaceflight and about the historical and existential meanings of going to the Moon that piqued Norman Mailer’s razor-sharp acumen for disdainful insight. Like other reporters, the Pulitz...