Sinking of the RMS Titanic

At 2.20 a.m., the hull snapped in two and sank to the ocean floor, taking more than 1,500 lives with it.

The Titanic disaster shocked the globe, demolishing human hubris and forcing immediate overhauls to maritime law, requiring lifeboats for all and 24-hour radio watches at sea.

Lisa Brady with more.

We're speaking with Dr. Stephen Beal, Executive Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center and Senior Lecturer on History and Literature at Harvard University and author of Down with the Old Canoe, A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster.

Hi, doctor.

Hi,

How did that happen? And how did the women and children first protocol play out? Because that didn't really work, for lack of a better term, either.

Right.

But this Yeah, you're right.

There's so much about the Hindenburg that it's kind of this moment that we know kind of like the Titanic of the skies, and yet we don't really know anything about it.

People are often wildly off of when they think it happened.

It actually happened in 1937.

And then your eye gets to the end of it and you say, oh, there's a swastika there.

Yeah.

And I mean, they're doing these beautiful things, eating wine and silk, and they're looking at where the Titanic sunk, not knowing that they are going to be the Titanic of the air.

It's just a great irony, I think.

Yep.

After the tragedy of the Titanic, Congress was treating ship wireless as a federal matter as the Radio Act of 1912 put ship wireless under federal rules.

This is something to keep in mind as, by the early 1920s, things could be described as quite chaotic with radio stations popping up around the country.

However, that chaos was rather useful.

Those words sound civic, but they also gave a political body the power to decide which voices were legitimate and which were just

noise.

Which is a bit ironic because the story of the Titanic is not legitimate.

Let's take a look.

Um, and then we have some historical writers as well, like Nicola Pierce, who, um, also came and did an event for Clare Libraries History Week, and then an event for us for Children's Book Festival.

And she writes about topics like the Titanic, so she's able to bring these topics to life for the children.

Um, and they're very much linking back to then to their own curriculum as well.

There seems to be a real emphasis as well, Niamh, on making the events interactive, you know, with storytelling, crafts, workshops, rather than simply the children, and, uh, uh, the festival does cater from those in junior infants right through to sixth class, uh, rather than-

So it's a very exciting and extra element that we couldn't have done without the support of Culture Ireland.

Fantastic.

I know you mentioned, uh, you know, in terms of the historical themes, the, the Titanic.

Something I'm fascinated about myself.

They had many smoking rooms on the Graf Zeppelin as well, but one of the many smoking lounges on the Hindenburg.

And airship travel was really for all classes, much like you've seen on those steam liners, those beautiful passenger steam liners back then, like the Titanic, Oceanic.

I know because that's one of my son's favorite subjects is the Titanic.

Well, him and my mom were watching a documentary about the Titanic when she was up visiting the other day.

I came home and they were watching it and I was so proud of them.

So proud of them.

Haven't broke his heart about what really happened with the Titanic yet.

This is a photo again of the interior of the Hindenburg.