Allison Morris Blog #1: Titanic

Hello everyone,
      None of my books have come in yet this week, so this blog is going to be an analysis of a secondary source, a journal article which I found on JSTOR. The source is: The Night the Good Ship Went Down, Three Fateful Dinners Aboard the Titanic by Andrea Broomfield. It was written in 2009, so it is a fairly recent source.
     The focus of Broomfield's article is looking at social classes aboard the Titanic by analyzing the food that they ate. Broomfield argued that the planners of the Titanic reflected social classes especially at dinnertime by reflecting their "sense of their own needs and identities" (Broomfield 32). According to Broomfield, the meals aboard the Titanic were designed very carefully because the American owned ship was one of the first that catered to all social classes, not only the very wealthy as the industry had once tried to attract. Her thesis is "The three different dinners served to the various classes of passengers the night the Titanic went down reveal a rich, nuanced story about the intersections of class, nationalism, and mass consumerism on the eve of World War One" (Broomfield 32).
     This article will be helpful to my research because I am interested in the social aspects of the Titanic. Before reading this article I really had only thought about how the wealthy were catered to aboard the Titanic because I had read about how the lower class a person belonged to, the more likely they were to have died in the sinking of the Titanic. Broomfield however, discussed how the ship industry was completely changing and trying to accept all classes of people and they were very careful in their planning to make second and third class passengers feel comfortable. Something Broomfield also discussed is how these social groups were able to mingle in this unique situation aboard the Titanic, something they most likely would not have done outside the boat.
     The Titanic meant different things to different social groups. For the wealthy, it was an exciting trip with great food, activities, and chances to socialize with others like themselves. For many of the third class passengers, the ship represented a way to new opportunities in America. I appreciated the details that Broomfield included in her article including the last meal that third class passengers ate on the Titanic which included roast beef, potatoes, corn, rice soup, biscuits, and plum pudding. The types of food in addition to how many and when the courses were served were meant to reflect what the different social classes would have ate at home. Broomfield argued that the roast beef in this last meal was symbolic of prosperous people, because the third class passengers would have ate it only on special occasions. The plum pudding was usually only served by lower classes on celebrations such as Christmas. Broomfield went on to analyze all three final menus' served aboard the Titanic to prove her thesis. I am not going to go into detail about these because it would be way to much information to include on here, but hopefully this will show the direction of where I am going with this project. I am mostly interested in the social classes and how they interacted before and during the sinking of the ship. This article gives good insight and has made me think of new questions and ways to approach my topic.