The Meaning of the Titanic Disaster.
The 1912 sinking of the luxury liner Titanic is one of the few historical events with near 100% name recognition. But what does it really mean in the scheme of things?
Above is a link/embed to my latest project: a long-form video, posted on my YouTube channel, entitled The Meaning of the Titanic. It’s a rumination on the historical and cultural resonance of an event that’s been constantly rehashed and scrutinized for the last 110 years in books, films, TV presentations and every other sort of media. And yet, for all the attention and interest in the minutiae of the disaster—down to the kind of rivets used in the hull—few people, let alone professional historians, ever ask the question: what does this event really mean?
You’ll have to watch the video to see how I try to frame an answer to that question—it involves a historical concept I call “quiver theory”—but along the way you may go down more historical rabbit holes than you might have expected to regarding the Titanic. Some of the topics I cover include World War I and its antecedents, Ireland and its relationship to the UK, gender and class issues on the Titanic (“women and children first”), the six obscure survivors from China, other questions of race and ethnicity, labor history, the coal strike of 1912, Carl Jung and his “collective unconscious” theory, the apocalyptic landscapes of German impressionist Ludwig Meidner, how the Titanic disaster is like Brexit, and much, much more.
The research and production on this video was pretty in-depth. I've never tried long form on YouTube before, but some other creators have been experimenting with it, with varying degrees of success. Anyway, hope you enjoy and learn something.
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