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One of these days (I’m not holding my breath), Hollywood will produce a feature film about vice-presidential candidates in the 19th century, and the casting will be spot-on. That is, once the casting director gets hold of historical photos of politicians most of us haven’t ever seen. Or, in some cases, paintings. Shown here are John Breckinridge of Kentucky, who served vice-president under James Buchanan, and actor Matthew Perry. See eleven of the men who ran for vice-president and the actors they resemble at mental_floss. Link
No, you’re not looking at a secret level in a Super Mario game. This is a picture of a medieval illuminated manuscript with a touch of photoshoppery applied. Carl Pyrdum, a medieval scholar, uses our friendly plumber to explain the artistic norms of the medium:
In order to keep the man and his goat in the middle from falling right on through the bottom of the page, the artist draws in little patches of ground beneath them.** Mario, no stranger to platforms that hang in the air as if bolted to the background, would feel right at home with this arrangement.
Link -via Boing Boing
Neatorama presents a guest post from actor, comedian, and voiceover artist Eddie Deezen. Visit Eddie at his website.
An actor playing Adolf Hitler -now that’s an interesting proposition. As anyone in Hollywood well knows, correct, precise casting can make or break a movie. So let’s imagine we’re doing a movie about Der Fuhrer. Who should we cast to play him?
Okay, the logical choice is painfully obvious, and actually ironic. Ironic only because the perfect actor to portray Adolf Hitler was, indeed, also the first American actor ever to play/satirize Der Fuhrer in a movie. Not to mention he was also a Jew. Hitler, okay, let’s see, a loud-mouthed, quick-tempered blowhard, an overbearing bully who enjoyed punishing those who didn’t follow his orders exactly. Does Moe Howard of the Three Stooges come to mind? Hmmm…
It was in January of 1940 that Moe and his two pals, those hilariously funny slapstick comics known the world over as the Three Stooges, made the very first movie satirizing Adolf Hitler and the then-growing Nazi movement in Germany and other countries. Nine months later, Charlie Chaplin came out with his more famous Hitler satire The Great Dictator. But I repeat, the Stooges were the historic first.
At the time the Stooges filmed You Nazty Spy! the United States was still very ambivalent about entering World War II. Isolationist sentiment ran rife across America and many feared making any film about Hitler and the Third Reich might stir up anti-Nazi feelings among the public. Many senators, such as Burton Wheeler and Geraldine Nye, were also severe isolationists who objected to any anti-Nazi movies on the grounds that they were propaganda designed to mobilize American fervor for war.
While the Three Stooges are often looked down upon by the “elites” and many film intellectuals, one must be fair and give them at least some credit for their courage in taking on the unpopular subject almost two full years before the U.S. entered World War II. The contemporary comparisons between certain segments of the American public and their widely diverse opinions on “offending our enemies” in 2012 are all too obvious.
You Natzy Spy!, the boys’ 44th short for Columbia Pictures, was Moe’s favorite Three Stooges short (pretty high praise, considering he appeared in 189 others). According to some sources, it was also Larry’s favorite Stooge short.
Moronika appears on a map in the later short I'll Never Heil Again.
Moe stars as Moe Hailstone, a small-time paperhanger, along with his buddies: Curly Gallstone and Larry Pebble (while Moe was obviously Hitler, Curly was Hermann Goering and Larry was Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s two chief Nazi pals). The country of Moronica needs a dictator to take over and sway the angry masses into a more cooperative state.
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John Pemberton earned a medical degree when he was only 19 years old -and then worked as a pharmacist, trying to invent new drugs. He particularly needed a new kind of pain relief, as he was badly wounded in the Civiil war and had become addicted to morphine for relief.
After the war, Pemberton settled in Atlanta, where he began work on a beverage combining coca leaves and cola nuts. His objective was to create a pain reliever but when his lab assistant accidentally mixed the concoction with carbonated water on May 8, 1886, the two men tasted it, liked it, and decided it might make a profitable alternative to ginger ale and root beer.
Pemberton sold the rights to Coca-Cola (twice, actually, but that’s another story) as his behavior became more erratic. He died only two years after his accidental invention and only a few months after the Coca Cola Corporation was incorporated.
The Coca-Cola that you may be drinking right now has been reformulated a bit over the years, but the basic beverage is 126 years old today. Link
The word scurvy may make you think of pirates and sailors on long sea voyages, but “land scurvy” affected many European Crusaders who spent months trudging through the Middle East. In 1747, Scottish physician James Lind found that oranges and lemons could cure scurvy, but that didn’t help all sailors.
The British establishment grasped onto the concept of citrus, and then did it really really wrong. First, they substituted cheap and easy to get limes – readily available from British holdings in the Caribbean – for the more effective lemons or oranges. Then they further boiled the limes in copper vessels, which had the non-helpful side effect of reducing the (thus far unknown) Vitamin C content even further.
People began to suspect that maaaaybe this whole citrus thing was not as effective as it had been claimed. Of course by then steam engines in ships brought the age of sail and voyages of longer than 6 weeks to an end. Semi-success-via-roundabout-ways!
Read more about how gradual advances gave us the real cure for scurvy at Atlas Obscura. Link
Ruth and Jesse Warren of Topeka, Kansas, bought a 1934 Ford Fordor Deluxe Sedan. They hadn’t owned it very long when on April 29th, 1934, Ruth noticed the car was missing. A month later the Warrens were informed the car was in Louisiana, with 160 bullet holes in it after Texas lawmen shot and killed Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow. The Warrens had to go to federal court to take back possession of their car, as the sheriff wanted to keep it for his trouble. Even then, they had to pay a $70 storage fee! The Warren car became more famous every year after that, as people flocked to see a part of history. You can follow its story through lots of links to tons of pages full of photographs and newspaper clippings. Link -via Everlasting Blort
Astronaut John Young, commander of Apollo 16, tells a story during the April 1972 mission. Contains NSFW language that you won’t hear in any museum exhibit I know of. -via Metafilter
Some Roman Emperors violated tradition and died peacefully in their beds. Most, however, met violent ends, particularly in last two centuries of the empire in the West. Josh Fruhlinger, once a graduate student in ancient history, has sorted all of the Western emperors by the brutality of their deaths. The #1 position goes to Valerian (r. 253-260), the only Emperor to become a prisoner of war. The Persians were not kind:
Captured by the Persians and died in captivity; rumored to have been used as a human footstool by the Persian king, killed by having molten gold poured down his throat, then taxidermied.
Link -via Super Punch | Image: Saperaud
The British Council has released a collection of films produced in the 1940s to show the world how the British lived and worked.
Over 120 films were produced as ‘cultural propaganda’ to counteract anything the Nazis might throw out and to refute the idea that ours was a country stuck in the past. These films were designed to showcase Britain to the rest of the world, at a time when Britain itself was under attack.
Seen by millions of people in over 100 countries worldwide from the 1940′s to 1960′s, they present a historic snapshot of Britain, portraying its industry, its landscapes, and its people. The Collection is fantastically varied, covering anything from how a bicycle is made, to how the British spend their Saturdays.
You can browse through 80 available films. Link -via Boing Boing
Did you know that our Founding Father, George Washington, was a tagger?
In 1750, George Washington, then a young surveyor, painted his initial "G.W." and surveyor's cross on the cliff of Natural Bridge in Rockbridge County, Virginia.
Source: the 1976 PSA Graffiti: Fun or Dumb - via Juxtapoz Magazine
May first is often called May Day for various reasons, but it is also International Workers’ Day. The date chosen is in commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, an incident which began with a labor demonstration on May 1, 1886 in which 35,000 workers walked off their jobs to demand an eight-hour workday. Escalating tensions led to clashes with police, and on May fourth, someone threw a firebomb that led to a gunfight. Eight police officers and an undetermined number of civilians were killed.
Police arrested hundreds of people, but never determined the identity of the bomb thrower. Amidst public clamor for revenge, however, eight anarchists, including prominent speakers and writers, were tried for murder. The partisan Judge Joseph E. Gary conducted the trial, and all 12 jurors acknowledged prejudice against the defendants. Lacking credible evidence that the defendants threw the bomb or organized the bomb throwing, prosecutors focused on their writings and speeches. The jury, instructed to adopt a conspiracy theory without legal precedent, convicted all eight. Seven were sentenced to death. The trial is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history.
Many Americans were outraged at the verdicts, but legal appeals failed. Two death sentences were commuted, but on November 11, 1887, four defendants were hanged in the Cook County jail; one committed suicide. Hundreds of thousands turned out for the funeral procession of the five dead men. In 1893, Governor John Peter Altgeld granted the three imprisoned defendants absolute pardon, citing the lack of evidence against them and the unfairness of the trial.
Read more about the Haymarket incident at the Encyclopedia of Chicago. Link -via Metafilter, where you’ll find many more links on May Day.
Surely you recall the campaign slogan, “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa?” James G. Blaine used it when he ran against Grover Cleveland in 1884. However, Cleveland won that race, with his own negative but catchy rhyming slogan that also made the list. After the election was over, Blaine’s campaign slogan was amended in the popular press as “Ma, Ma, Where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha.” Whether the candidates were winners or losers, these eleven campaign slogans from history (with accompanying political cartoons) win the prize for making you stop and think, “What?” Link
John Flammang Schrank is not as well-known a name as Lee Harvey Oswald or John Wilkes Booth or even John Hinkley, Jr. That’s because the president he shot was already out of office and running again on a third-party ticket in 1912. And Theodore Roosevelt survived being shot in the chest. In fact, you are probably more familiar with the story of how Roosevelt gave his intended hour-long speech before going to the hospital!
He took the podium to great cheering, then spoke softly to the thousands in attendance. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”
Roosevelt went on to speak of the importance of the Progressive movement. He said he did not know the man who shot him, but that he was a coward and that the untruths printed in newspapers, on behalf of his opponents, had incited “weak and vicious minds” to acts of violence.
“Now, friends, I am not speaking for myself at all, I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap…. Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the ‘Havenots’ arraigned against the creed of the ‘Haves.’ When that day comes then such incidents as this to-night will be commonplace in our history.”
The story of the incident at the Past Imperfect blog at Smithsonian tells how Roosevelt’s life was saved by the contents of his pocket, but also has the background of the shooter Shrank and his motive for assassination. Link
A 351 foot tall obelisk near Hopkinsville, Kentucky marks the birthplace of Jefferson Davis, the first and last President of the Confederate States of America. Yesterday, his ghost smote tourists from Illinois who tried to ride the elevator to the top:
But a group of 13 from “up north” were held captive in an elevator atop the Jefferson Davis Monument, in Hopkinsville, KY, for just more than an hour Saturday morning.
Firefighters were able to reach the tourist group from Illinois, and all 13 were able to walk down the stairs safely, according to Lt. Micheal Martin, Fairview Volunteer Fire Department.
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: US National Archives
Laws against jaywalking are there to protect people from automobiles, but that’s a relatively new concept in the long history of roads. A hundred years ago, pedestrians had the same right to use the streets as cars (or horses, for that matter). When a person on foot was killed by the newfangled automobiles, it was always assumed to be the driver’s fault.
“If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars,” says Norton. “That’s practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago.”
Streets back then were vibrant places with a multitude of users and uses. When the automobile first showed up, Norton says, it was seen as an intruder and a menace. Editorial cartoons regularly depicted the Grim Reaper behind the wheel. That image persisted well into the 1920s.
Today, livable streets advocates such as New York’s Transportation Alternatives spend a lot of time and energy trying to get people to take pedestrian fatalities seriously. But at the beginning of the 20th century, traffic deaths – particularly the deaths of children – drew enormous attention.
“If a child is struck and killed by a car in 2012, it is treated as a private loss, to be grieved privately by the family,” Norton says. “Before, this stuff was treated as a public loss – much like the death of soldiers.” Mayors dedicated monuments to the victims of traffic crimes, accompanied by marching bands and children dressed in white, carrying flowers.
So what happened that relegated pedestrians to the sidewalks and cross walks? The turning point was a public relations battle over a referendum in Cincinnati. Read what happened at The Atlantic Cities. Link -via Boing Boing
(Image credit: Flickr user Jay Wilson)
For many years, I “knew” that the Volkswagen was invented by Ferdinand Porsche. But the story is actually much more complicated. In 1923, long before auto companies were competing to offer Hitler a “people’s car” (Volkswagen), Josef Ganz was working on a design for a small, beetle-shaped car. By 1930 he had a prototype, and by 1933 a manufacturer was making Ganz’s Standard Superior model pictured here.
Hitler by then was determined to support the development of a Volkswagen for the German people. Having found no cooperation amongst the big car manufacturers, an independent development consortium was created, led by Ferdinand Porsche. As a Jew, Josef Ganz was an impossible choice. Porsche was now set the task to design a people’s car for 1,000 Reichsmark – a maximum selling price propagated by Ganz in Motor-Kritik.
The Nazis made sure that any Jewish connections to the Volkswagen were erased from history. They banned Ganz from publishing, as well as the entire German press from publishing anything about him. Overnight the name Josef Ganz disappeared from the German motoring scene.
You can read the story of Josef Ganz and his auto designs at Dark Roasted Blend. Link
Sadly, you can’t challenge people to fight to the death these days without coming across as a weirdo and getting hauled into the editor’s office for a lecture about how to resolve workplace conflicts. It was not always so. Early in American history, dueling was an accepted if legally dubious practice.
James Shields, an Illinois politician, once challenged Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln and other people had written pseudonymous letters attacking Shields’s policies. Shields then demanded satisfaction:
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In 1942, residents of a sleepy rural town in eastern Tennessee arrived home to find eviction notices tacked on their front doors. Some were told to get out in as soon as just two weeks, with compensation but no reason given (much later, we all found out why).
Over the years, the government turned that rural area into a secret but bustling city of 70,000 people. So secret was the city that it was ringed with fences with armed guards and didn't even show up on any maps. Even its name, Oak Ridge, was carefully chosen to be bland, rural-sounding name to hold "outside curiosity to a minimum."
But what is life inside a secret city looks like? A Continuous Lean blog has a gallery of digitized photos recently released by the Department of Energy: Link | More at Flickr
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Legendary Lost Bathroom Reader.
In the early 1950s, Senator Joseph McCarthy had Americans believing that Red Agents were infiltrating the U.S. government. the result was on of the biggest witch hunts in American history. But according to It’s A Conspiracy! by The National Insecurity Council, McCarthy lied. Here’s the part of the story you may not have heard.
On February 9, 1950, Joe McCarthy, a rumpled, ill-shaven junior senator from Wisconsin, made a Lincoln’s Birthday speech to a Republican women’s club in Wheeling, West Virginia. No one -not even McCarthy- considered it an important appearance. Yet that speech made Senator Joe McCarthy the most feared man in America.
Waving a piece of paper before the group, McCarthy declared, “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names made known to the Secretary of State as being members of the Communist party, who are nevertheless still working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
Republicans had been calling Democrats Communists for years. But before this it had just been political name-calling -no one had claimed to know exactly how many Communists were supposedly in the government. This was a paranoid nation’s worst nightmare come true; McCarthy’s speech made headlines. By the time he had given a similar speech in Salt Lake City and returned to Washington, D.C., newspapers from coast to coast had repeated his charges as fact and the country was in an uproar.
The McCarthy Era -an American inquisition that ruined the lives of thousands of innocent citizens accused of being Communists, Communist dupes, or Communist sympathizers- had begun.
THE MCCARTHY ERA
* Although he never substantiated his charges, McCarthy’s influence grew rapidly. As chair of the Permanent Investigations Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Government Operations, he presided over a witch-hunt for Communists. Americans from all walks of life were challenged to prove their loyalty in an atmosphere of panic and paranoia.
* Fear became his most potent weapon. “Many of those who came before McCarthy, as well as many who testified before the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were willing to point fingers at others to save their own careers and reputations,” writes Kenneth Davis in Don’t Know Much About History. “To fight back was to be tarred with McCarthy’s ‘Communist sympathizer’ brush… In this cynical atmosphere, laws of evidence and constitutional guarantees didn’t apply.”
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It was 1895, and in the studio of Alphonse Mucha. That’s all the context that we have. We don’t know why Post-Impressionist painter Paul Gauguin took off his pants. But we should not be surprised. William-Adolphe Bouguereau would live for another ten years, but the Academic traditions of realistic representation and wearing pants were already dead.
The era surrounding World War II was such a rich period of history that it’s no wonder many facts simply slipped under the radar, only to be discovered by historians decades later.
The story of the FUSAG is one which escaped the mainstream annals of history, due in part to the secretive nature of the operation.
Known as the Ghost Army, the FUSAG was a phantom Army Group used to draw the Nazis off the trail of other invasion plans which had been set into motion.
Here’s more on the ultimate bluff:
The Allied intelligence services created two fake armies to keep the Germans on their toes. One would be based in Scotland for a supposed invasion of Norway and the other headquartered in southeast England to threaten the Pas-de-Calais.
The northern operation relied mainly on fake radio traffic and the feeding of false information to double agents to create the impression of a substantial army. Fortitude South, though, was well within the range of prying German ears and eyes, so fake chatter alone would be uncovered too quickly.
The Allies would have to make it look and sound like a substantial army was building up in southeast England. They needed boots on the ground there, without actually using too much of their precious manpower.
When intelligence officers learned that the First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) was to be redesignated the 12th Army Group, they knew they had their Pas-de-Calais invaders. The FUSAG was kept alive on paper, and the phantom army was given a few real soldiers and placed under the command of one of the era’s great military leaders.
Want to know more? Head over to Mental Floss and read the entire article by Matt Soniak to get the whole scoop on the ultimate wartime fake out.
–via Mental Floss
This film reel from the British Pathe digital archive is called Panefull Business, and it showcases the brave window cleaners who kept the Empire State Building nice and shiny circa 1938.
It’ll make you appreciate your day job, unless you’re an adrenaline junky and would enjoy hanging around 1200 feet above the ground all day!
–via TDW
Imagine you had lived all your life without TV, but after seeing it once, you had to explain television to other people who had never seen one. Buzzfeed collected clips from newspapers that announced the new technologies of the telephone, automobile, microwave oven, credit card, and other breakthrough inventions we all take for granted now. Link
Dick Clark, the man who introduced rock ‘n’ roll to America, died this morning of a heart attack. Clark was best known as the host of the show American Bandstand, on which he appeared for 31 years.
Long dubbed “the world’s oldest teenager” because of his boyish appearance, Clark bridged the rebellious new music scene and traditional show business, and was equally comfortable whether chatting about music with Sam Cooke or bantering with Ed McMahon about TV bloopers. He thrived as the founder of Dick Clark Productions, supplying movies, game and music shows, beauty contests and more to TV. Among his credits: “The $25,000 Pyramid,” “TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes” and the American Music Awards.
For a time in the 1980s, he had shows on all three networks and was listed among the Forbes 400 of wealthiest Americans. Clark also was part of radio as partner in the United Stations Radio Networks, which provided programs – including Clark’s – to thousands of stations.
Dick Clark may be better known to a younger generation as the host of Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, which began in 1972. Clark was 82. Link
Using
celebrities to sign people up for stuff is an age old technique that even
the Roman Empire was familiar with.
A newly translated inscription dating about 1,800 years revealed that the Roman army used a mixed martial arts champ to recruit soldiers:
His name was Lucius Septimius Flavianus Flavillianus and he was a champion at wrestling and pankration, the latter a bloody, and at times lethal, mixed martial art where contestants would try to pound each other unconscious or into submission.
Flavillianus proved to be so successful as a military recruiter that it was decreed that he be made a "cult figure in the band of heroes" after he died, with each tribe of the city erecting statues in his honor. The inscription, written in Greek, was engraved on the base of a statue found in Oinoanda's agora (a central public space) and would have been erected by the people of the city.
Link (Photo: Shutterstock) - via A Blog About History
Bill Sauder talks about examining relics from the Titanic, in this clip from a NatGeo special. The perfumes he is talking about belonged to Adolphe Saalfeld, who was bringing samples to the United States in hopes he could market them here. Saalfeld survived the disaster and died in 1926. You can see the perfume case in an exhibit of Titanic relics. -via reddit
Ben Schmidt took data from ship’s logs to make a visualization of ocean traffic between 1750 and 1850. It is not meant to be comprehensive, as logs from many nations are not represented, and traffic on the Pacific is lost due to the orientation of the globe. But it’s still an interesting way to see how world exploration and trade progressed through the period. Schmidt also made another video showing just one year of traffic in more detail. See it and read about how this project was done at Sapping Attention. Link -via Metafilter
British respect for George Washington runs deep. In 1814, while on its way to burn the city named in his honor, a British fleet tolled a salute to Washington as it passed by Mount Vernon. So it comes as no surprise that a debate hosted by the UK’s National Army Museum selected Washington as the greatest foe to ever lead an army against Britain:
At the event, each contender had their case made by a historian giving a 40 minute presentation. The audience, who had paid to attend the day, then voted in a secret ballot after all five presentations had been made. [...]
Stephen Brumwell, author and specialist on eighteenth century North America, said: “Washington scores highly as an enemy of Britain on three key grounds: the immense scale of damage he inflicts upon Britain’s Army and Empire – the most jarring defeat that either endured; his ability to not only provide inspirational battlefield leadership but to work with civilians who were crucial to sustain the war-effort; and the kind of man he was. As British officers conceded, he was a worthy opponent.
The other choices were Michael Collins, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Who else do you think deserved consideration?
Link -via Ace of Spades HQ | Image: Smithsonian Institution
Can you just plop a community of 70,000 residents onto 70,000 acres of land and keep it a secret? Sort of. People in the area knew that the government was doing something classified at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, but since there was a war on, no one questioned the need for secrecy.
In 1942, as part of the Manhattan Project, the U.S. government acquired 70,000 acres of land in Eastern Tennessee and established a secret town called Oak Ridge. The name chosen to keep outside speculation to a minimum, because Oak Ridge served a vital role for the development of the atomic bomb. The massive complex of massive factories, administrative buildings and every other place a normal town needs to function, was developed for the sole purpose of separating uranium for the Manhattan Project. The completely planned community was designed by the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and had a population of more than 70,000 people. Due to the sensitive nature of the work at Oak Ridge, the entire town was fenced in with armed guards and the entire place — much like the Manhattan Project in general — was a secret of the highest concern.
My grandfather worked at the Oak Ridge facility during the war, and when he went home to the farm, he never discussed anything work-related with his family. Read more about how Oak Ridge was born at A Continuous Lean. Link -via Metafilter
The ocean liner Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, 100 years ago today. You’ve noticed the internet seems to be obsessed with this historic event, and Neatorama is no exception. In an extensive article at The New Yorker, we see how the story of the Titanic became entrenched in 20th-century culture, and several reasons are given for its extraordinary popularity. One is that the disaster happened to occur at the dawn of mass communication.
The Titanic was one of the first ships in history to issue an SOS. (“Send S.O.S.,” the twenty-two-year-old Harold Bride, the Titanic’s junior wireless operator, who survived, told the twenty-five-year-old Jack Phillips, the senior officer, who died. “It’s the new call, and it may be your last chance to send it.”) And the sinking was among the first global news stories to be reported, thanks to wireless radio, more or less simultaneously with the events. One of the early headlines, which appeared as the rescue ship carried survivors to New York—“WATCHERS ANGERED BY CARPATHIA’S SILENCE”—suggests how fast we became accustomed to an accelerating news cycle. The book winningly portrays the wireless boys of a hundred years ago as the computer geeks of their day, from their extreme youth to their strikingly familiar lingo. “WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH U?,” came one response to the Titanic’s distress call.
The article also examines themes of class and privilege, hubris, and heroism.
If you were writing a morality play about class privilege, you couldn’t do better than to dream up a glamorous ship of fools and load it with everyone from the A-list to immigrants coming to America for a better life. The class issue is one major reason the Titanic disaster has always been so ripe for dramatization. And yet the way we tell the story reveals more about us than it does about what happened. If the indignant depictions of the class system in so many Titanic dramas coexist uneasily with their adoring depictions of upper-crust privilege, that, too, is part of the appeal: it allows us to demonstrate our liberalism even as we indulge our consumerism.
The story of the Titanic had almost every dramatic angle possible for a great book or film, which is why so many books (both fiction and non-fiction), songs, poems, and movies sprang from the real-life disaster. You may find some titles you’ll want to read or watch in the article at The New Yorker. Link
Further reading on the Titanic at Neatorama
Masabumi Hosono: The Man Condemned for Surviving The Titanic
The Laroche Family on the Titanic
And many more posts on the Titanic.
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