When it struck an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic on 14 April 1912, the RMS Titanic made headlines around the world.
Now, eighty-five years after the famous nautical disaster, the Titanic is dominating the media once again. The past year saw the release of a number of Titanic-inspired offerings, including a television miniseries and two documentaries, a Broadway musical, an interactive CD-ROM which takes the user on a virtual tour of the ship, a compact-disc collection of ragtime songs that were played by the liner’s ill-fated orchestra, and a mega-budget Hollywood film. Even more numerous have been recent books about the ship, which have ranged from scholarly (Down with the Old Canoe: A Cultural History of the "Titanic" …ver más…

The ship sank at about 2:20 a.m. Afterward, statistics revealed that sixty percent of first-class passengers survived, forty-four percent of second-class passengers, and only twenty-five percent of third-class passengers. The death rate was higher for third-class children than for first-class men.
Astor, Guggenheim, and their cohorts on the Social Register were the luminaries of the Belle Epoque. In a time before television, film, radio, or sports stars, wealthy folk were the celebrities of the Gilded Age, and the press reported their doings to a gossip-hungry public. Thus, when news of the Titanic’s sinking was reported by the New York American, the story was devoted almost entirely to Astor; a bit at the end mentioned that over one thousand other people had also perished.
“God Himself Could Not Sink This Ship”
Both the Titanic and her nearly-identical sister ship, the Olympic, were given names that evoked the gods. An editorial writer in the Belfast Morning News of 1 June 1911 wondered why the White Star Line had named its luxurious new ship Titanic:
The Titans were a mythological race who came to believe they’d conquered nature, who thought they’d achieved power and learning greater than Zeus himself, to their ultimate ruin. He smote the strong and daring Titans with thunderbolts; and their final abiding place was in some limbo beneath the