Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions: A Floating Microcosm of Edwardian Society

Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions: A Floating Microcosm of Edwardian Society

Brown, Kevin

Hardcover

General World HistoryBritish History

Publisher Price: $34.95

ISBN10: 1036119726
ISBN13: 9781036119720
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
Published: May 30 2025
Pages: 256
Weight: 1.10
Height: 1.10 Width: 6.40 Depth: 9.30
Language: English
A fresh exploration of the Titanic disaster reveals how class, gender, and racial prejudices shaped contemporary responses.

When it set sail on its ill-fated maiden voyage, RMS Titanic was a marvel of modern technology and the latest in luxury, providing a gilded setting and false sense of security for its passengers to act out their imagined ideal lives in a reflection of pre-First World War society. When disaster struck in the form of an iceberg four days into its maiden voyage, that society was frozen in a moment of time, revealing class, gender and racial discrimination that pervaded contemporary social attitudes.

Kevin Brown takes a fresh approach in exploring the social attitudes to class, manliness, heroism and cowardice, social redemption, the proper role of women and the social, religious and racial prejudices revealed by the sinking. He re-evaluates the code of women and children first, revealing how attitudes glorifying manliness influenced the behaviour of passengers and crew during the sinking, as well as suggesting a narrative of chivalry and self-sacrifice to create heroes from the victims and brand the surviving men as cowards; an interpretation that is challenged here.

Eyewitness accounts evoke the horror of the night and reveal the underlying ideas of the day. They also show that women played a less passive role than expected of them. The responses to the sinking by politicians across the spectrum, the labour movement and suffragettes, suffragists and anti-suffragists is explored to show more critical contemporary responses to the disaster that challenge the heroic narrative. It was a world that was never so confident in modernity after the disaster but yet still held on to illusions of chivalry.

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General World History

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