The Gold Standard of Titanic History

     The focus of this blog will be to analyze another secondary source titled A Night To Remember by Walter Lord. I came across this book after seeing its title several times in my other secondary source books and journal articles. All of my other secondary sources have come from the 1990's and 2000's, so I decided on a hunch I should see what earlier historians have written and why this book in particular has been quoted by recent scholars. A Night To Remember, published in 1955, is important because it seems to be the gold standard or at least one of the first  historical books published about the Titanic after it sank. Although Lord did not include footnotes or a bibliography, the book was intriguing and I didn't want to put it down after I started reading it.

    Because he did not include footnotes or anything that current historians would use to measure the validity of a historically accurate book, I decided to do a little research about Walter Lord and I found that he has satisfactory credentials. The website for the Titanic Historical Society has a thorough biography of Mr. Lord. According to the Society, Lord was American and he lived from 1917 to 2002. He got a bachelors degree in history from Princeton in 1939. He worked as an intelligence analyst in London and as a code clerk in Washington D.C. during World War II. After the war ended, Lord returned to school and earned a law degree from Yale. Shortly after that he became a copywriter in New York and began to publish books about history. A Night To Remember was extremely successful and according to the article, Lord interviewed around sixty survivors while conducting research for his book. In 1956 there was a television series based on the book, and two years later it was made into a film. Lord went on to publish many more historically based books into the 1980's.

      Part of Walter Lord's charm was that he included second to second details starting with the moment a lookout spotted an iceberg in the Titanic's path and ending with the experiences of the survivors that were rescued by the Carpathia's crew. It is easy to imagine every scene that Lord described and he eloquently moved back and forth between passengers belonging to different classes as well as the various members of the crew. Because he used so many quotes from survivors, the book reads almost like a primary source. Lord did not give much of his own analysis, he was purely interested in the facts surrounding the sinking of the ship as well as the experience of those aboard the Titanic. In his book he also included a full list of the names of Titanic passengers split into the different classes in addition to a section about pure facts including maps and lists of exactly who survived based on gender, class, and crew (which is useful to my research topic). What I liked best about this book is the passion Walter Lord wrote with while he told the history of the Titanic.

     My only negative critique of Lord is that it was often hard to tell who was talking and how he knew what that person said. Because he does not list sources and does not use footnotes, it is unclear where he got his information.  The Titanic Historical Society source stated that he did conduct interviews which is great that he was able to get first hand accounts. He would use quotes from people on the ship, but he would not say who had told him that information. Also I sometimes wondered if he had assumed certain things or embellished upon facts to sensationalize the story. Overall I did enjoy reading the book, and it is always important to know what the gold standard is on your topic especially for the Titanic because there has been a lot published about it, much of which is more popular culture and not scholarly.


Krebs, Albin and Richard Pyle. "A Tribute to Walter Lord." Titanic Historical Society. Accessed September 24, 2013. www.titanichistoricalsociety.org.


Lord, Walter. A Night To Remember. New York: Bantam Books, 1955.