Titanic Historian Stephanie Barczewski

     For this week's blog entry I am going to discuss Titanic: A Night Remembered by Stephanie Barczewski, published in 2004. Barczewski is professor at Clemson University in South Carolina and received her PhD from Yale. The title of her book is a play on words from the book I wrote about last week, the golden standard of Titanic histories, Walter Lord's A Night to Remember. Barczewski included the full story of the sinking of the Titanic based upon her interpretations of primary accounts, as well as six biographies of people who died.  She also includes in the appendix a list of all of the people who survived, their class, and which lifeboat they were in. Although the focus of my research has been concerned with who survived and why, Barczewski focused more on who died and why which is also useful to my research. I have learned a lot from Barczewski about the Titanic and I would like to highlight some interesting things she discussed concerning social class in addition to both survivors and victims of the Titanic's sinking.
    
     From this book, I have concluded three definite answers as to why some people stayed aboard the ship after they knew it was sinking and that they would probably die. 1) Many passengers did not take warnings seriously, it was midnight and many were in bed and just didn't believe the ship was sinking. 2) Many women were reluctant to leave their husbands because the lifeboats were loaded with only women and children at first. 3) Much of the crew were dedicated to performing their tasks including the lifeboat loaders, the officers, the captain, the engineers below trying to keep the power going for the wireless operators, and the band who played their instruments until the ship sank.

     Here are some interesting facts highlighted in Barczewski's book:

• First Class: These passengers were worth collectively over five hundred million dollars. They stayed in suites aboard the Titanic with fifty foot long promenade decks and paid around twenty thousand dollars in today's currency. The Titanic was legendary, the most luxurious boat ever built, which is why it attracted so many wealthy people. Alexander Carlisle, the managing director of the company who built the Titanic, once stated "we spent two hours discussing the carpets for the first class cabins and fifteen minutes discussing lifeboats" (3).
• Second Class: According to Barczewski, "the second class was the equivalent of the first on most ships with its own electric elevator, its own impressive staircase and its own smoking room and library" (8). Many of the second class passengers were professionals in the upper or upper middle classes going on vacation.
• Third class: Fifty-four percent of all passengers on the Titanic were in the Third class. According to Barczewski, "almost all of them had purchased one way tickets as they headed towards a new- and, they hoped, better- life in the United States" (9). The first passengers to know that the ship was sinking were single men in the forward lower decks who saw water flowing into their rooms (18).
• The only place where the second and third classes could mingle with first class was on Sunday during religious services.
• Stewards were ordered to knock on every passenger's door to tell them to put on life vests and get to the life boats. Not until 1 am, over an hour after hitting the iceberg does Barczewski argue there was a panic and rush to the boats when the crew started to shoot off distress rockets.
• There were several intriguing incidents the author included about people who wanted to stay on the boat and some who wanted to leave. One woman named Ida Straus had gotten into a lifeboat but climbed out telling her husband "We have been living together for many years, where you go, I go" (23). In another incident, a man dressed up with a woman's shawl in order to sneak on a boat. Another man tried to follow after him and also look like a woman but according to Barczewski "he landed among a group of second class men, who beat him senseless" (23).