Down With The Old Canoe A Cultural History Of The Titanic Disaster Updated Edition

"Brimming over with wit and insight…Fresh and fascinating." —Dan Rather Everyone from suffragists to their opponents; radicals, reformers, and capitalists; critics of technology and modern life; racists and xenophobes and champions of racial and ethnic equality; editorial writers and folk singers, preachers and poets found moral and cultural lessons in the sinking of the Titanic. In a new edition that both commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the disaster and elaborates, in a revised afterword, on the ship's continued impact on the public imagination (evidenced by the Titanic mania evoked by James Cameron's 1997 film), Steven Biel explores the Titanic in all its complexity and contradictions.

"Brimming over with wit and insight…Fresh and fascinating." —Dan Rather Everyone from suffragists to their opponents; radicals, reformers, and capitalists; critics of technology and modern life; racists and xenophobes and champions of racial and ethnic equality; editorial writers and folk singers, preachers and poets found moral and cultural lessons in the sinking of the Titanic. In a new edition that both commemorates the one hundredth anniversary of the disaster and elaborates, in a revised afterword, on the ship's continued impact on the public imagination (evidenced by the Titanic mania evoked by James Cameron's 1997 film), Steven Biel explores the Titanic in all its complexity and contradictions.

In this New York Times bestseller, the author of A Night to Remember and The Miracle of Dunkirk revisits the Titanic disaster. Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember was a landmark work that recounted the harrowing events of April 14, 1912, when the British ocean liner RMS Titanic went down in the North Atlantic Ocean, a book that inspired a classic movie of the same name. In The Night Lives On, Lord takes the exploration further, revealing information about the ship’s last hours that emerged in the decades that followed, and separating myths from facts. Was the ship really christened before setting sail on its maiden voyage? What song did the band play as water spilled over the bow? How did the ship’s wireless operators fail so badly, and why did the nearby Californian, just ten miles away when the Titanic struck the iceberg, not come to the rescue? Lord answers these questions and more, in a gripping investigation of the night when approximately 1,500 victims were lost to the sea.

Titanic scholars contend that the demise of “the unsinkable ship” left more behind than a memory of April 15, 1912, as an important point in history. Through books, films, stories, and songs, the archetypal shipwreck has endured as a metaphor for the perils of mankind’s hubris and the fallibility of technology. In 1985, the discovery of the long-missing wreckage two miles below the surface of the Atlantic revitalized interest in the Titanic and spawned a new generation of books, films, and, for the first time, websites, and computer games. James Cameron’s blockbuster Titanic became the biggest movie of all time and engendered still greater popular interest in the tragic event. This bibliography is a survey of the immense volume of literary, dramatic, and commercial endeavors that came out of history’s most compelling shipwreck. Organized by genre in accessible categories and short entries, the book includes Titanic-inspired documentaries, narrative films, children’s books, histories, short stories, novels, plays, articles, essays, software, websites, poems, and songs. Each entry includes a brief review, bibliographic information, and the technical details of the specific source. The reviews include subjective analysis designed to reflect the usefulness of the source and to be of benefit to researchers and scholars. Five appendices include lists of the actors appearing in more than one Titanic film, brief film and television appearances of the Titanic, films never or not yet released, books that survived the wreck, and books written by passengers.

In the modern era, there arose a prolific and vibrant print culture--books, newspapers, and magazines issued by and for diverse, often marginalized, groups. This long-overdue collection offers a unique foray into the multicultural world of reading and readers in the United States. The contributors to this award-winning collection pen interdisciplinary essays that examine the many ways print culture functions within different groups. The essays link gender, class, and ethnicity to the uses and goals of a wide variety of publications and also explore the role print materials play in constructing historical events like the Titanic disaster. Contributors: Lynne M. Adrian, Steven Biel, James P. Danky, Elizabeth Davey, Michael Fultz, Jacqueline Goldsby, Norma Fay Green, Violet Johnson, Elizabeth McHenry, Christine Pawley, Yumei Sun, and Rudolph J. Vecoli

A cloth bag containing eight copies of the title.

The narrative surrounding the Titanic's voyage, collision, and sinking in April 1912 seems tailor-made for film. With clear categories of gender, class, nationality, and religion, the dominating Titanic myth offers a wealth of motifs ripe for the silver screen-heroism, melodrama, love, despair, pleasure, pain, failure, triumph, memory and eternal guilt. This volume provides a detailed overview of Titanic films from 1912 to the present and analyzes the six major Titanic films, including the 1943 Nazi propaganda production, the 1953 Hollywood film, the 1958 British docudrama A Night to Remember, the 1979 TV production S.O.S. Titanic, the 1996 mini-series Titanic, and James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster. By showing how each film follows and builds on a pattern of fixed scenes, motifs and details defined as the "Titanic code," this work yields telling insights into why this specific disaster has maintained such great relevance into the 21st century.