Second Blog: Titanic

I experienced a lot of progress this past weekend when I went to visit family in Poplar Bluff. I was able to go to the library there and found three more books, one primary and two secondary sources as well as a documentary film about the life of Molly Brown. The documentary was a biography of Molly Brown who was born in Missouri and survived the Titanic. If you have seen the movie, her character is played by Kathy Bates. Only a short part of the film discussed the Titanic, however I felt it was useful placing the event in the context of other historical events of the time and it was interesting to learn about the life of Molly Brown because it made the research I am doing feel more personal.

A little bit about Molly Brown:
She was born in Hannibal, Mo in 1867.
She went from rags to riches after she moved to Colorado during the gold rush and married a man who owned a mining company who later became one of the richest men in the U.S. at the time after his mine struck gold. The Browns were able to send their daughter to school in Paris, which is who she was visiting when she found out from her son that her grandchild was sick in the U.S. This is why she bought a ticket for the Titanic. When the Titanic began to sink, Molly didn't want to get on a lifeboat because she was trying to help everyone else get on boats. Two men picked her up and forced her to get in a lifeboat. It seems that Brown was a very caring and selfless individual who took charge of the situation and comforted the other survivors after they were rescued by the crew of the Carpathia. She raised $5000 dollars as a donation for the Carpathia crew. She stated that her only regret was that she could not help more people during the sinking of the ship. On the tenth anniversary of the Titanic sinking, in 1922, Molly visited the grave site of the Titanic victims in Nova Scotia, because she always felt a connection to the Titanic. She was a huge supporter of women's rights and was one of the first women in the U.S. to run for congress. She died in 1932 at the age of 65 after suffering from a stroke.

One of the secondary sources I found is Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster by Steven Biel. I felt a small aha moment when reading this book because it has helped me understand some of the historical debates about the Titanic and I discovered that Biel is a revisionist historian for this topic. The book will be very useful for the historiographical assignment. A simple summary of the debate Biel discusses would be that orthodox Titanic historians have argued that the Titanic sinking was a significant event in the beginning of the twentieth century that changed society and marked a turning point in American history. They would describe pre-Titanic America as unified, peaceful, stable, and almost naïve. They view the Titanic sinking as an event was a precursor to the dangers of technology an progress. Biel argues against this, and puts the Titanic in the context of major events and culturally significant problems in the U.S. in 1912 including the suffrage movement, the labor issues, and the race problems including the lynching of African Americans.