Effects of Titanic

Effects of Titanic

Introduction

The 46,328-ton White Star Line cruise ship, RMS Titanic, was the largest and most luxurious liner ever put to sea when it struck an iceberg off Newfoundland on the night of April 14, 1912, while on its maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York. The “unsinkable” ship sank in the early hours of the following morning, taking with her more than 1,500 men, women, and children. Among the lost, privileged passengers were the multimillionaires John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim. Conventional renderings of the Titanic story have emphasized the exclusive nature of the voyage, with bejeweled passengers in the sumptuous dining room dancing to their doom as the band played on. While it is true that the most expensive first-class ticket cost $3,100 (roughly $124,000 at today's value), there was in fact a rigid class divide on board, with first-, second-, and third-class passengers strictly segregated. Consequently, the greatest number of deaths were among the third-class passengers, consigned to steerage quarters at the bottom of the ship, struggling vainly to reach the lifeboats on the upper decks.

Thesis Statement

The incidence of Titanic and titanic has had many sociological and technological effects on people's life.

Discussion

Culturally, the Titanic disaster has produced a wealth of representations, including folk songs and folk tales, novels such as Walter Lord's A Night to Remember (1955) and the popular film based on it, and James Cameron's Hollywood blockbuster Titanic (1997). However, in terms of its impact on US culture, it is the African-American response to the Titanic disaster that has been the most trenchant. For the directors of the White Star Line—as implied by their company name—the Titanic was to be an all-white community, in spite of its class divisions.

From its coal stokers to its millionaires, the Titanic was a floating monument to racial segregation; consequently, when the African-American world heavyweight boxing champion, Jack Johnson, could not book passage on the ship, black Americans refused to join in the collective grief that overtook Britain and the United States in the aftermath of the sinking. The blues singer Huddie Ledbetter—or Leadbelly, as he was better known—responded with a ballad, “Titanic,” that sarcastically praised segregation for saving the life of the great boxing hero. In fact, the sinking of the Titanic gave the black community a narrative from which to rewrite a positive African-American position within the disaster, in the form of long, ironic oral poems known collectively as the Titanic Toasts.

[The RMS Titanic in 1911]

This body of oppositional folklore, which coalesced in a variety of locations (Louisiana and Mississippi as early as the 1930s; Texas, Missouri, and New York as late as the 1960s), most likely emerged immediately after the disaster, although few white people would have heard the Toasts before their collection by folklorists in the 1960s. The mythical hero of the Toasts is Shine, the lone black stoker working in the bowels of the Titanic, enjoying the distress of the white passengers and crew and demonstrating his own life-saving cunning ...