Remember the Tuscania! : The Sinking, Its Aftermath, and a Century of Public Memory
Remember the Tuscania! : The Sinking, Its Aftermath, and a Century of Public Memory
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Author(s): Trout, Steven
ISBN No.: 9781501788949
Pages: 240
Year: 202609
Format: Trade Cloth (Hard Cover)
Price: $ 40.53
Dispatch delay: Dispatched between 7 to 15 days
Status: Available (Forthcoming)

Remember the Tuscania plunges readers into the night of February 5, 1918, when a German U-Boat's torpedo found a crowded American troopship in the North Atlantic?and into the century of argument, propaganda, and remembrance that followed. At its heart are the "Baraboo Twenty-One," citizen-soldiers from a Wisconsin town who survived the sinking that became the deadliest U-boat attack on Americans in the First World War and the nation's first mass-casualty event of the conflict. Steven Trout braids military history and cultural history with a dramatic pulse. He reconstructs the voyage and catastrophe in detail; then he follows the aftershocks across newspapers, posters, cartoons, poems, and sheet music as the home front seized on a new rallying cry?"Remember the Tuscania !"?and turned the dead into usable symbols. Trout also exposes a War Department fiasco over casualty lists that helped force reforms to identification practices (serial numbers on dog tags; rosters kept at hand aboard transports). Remember the Tuscania draws attention to how people memorialize dramatic wartime events: the Isle of Islay's windswept "American Monument," improvised funerals beneath a hastily sewn Stars and Stripes, the formation of the National Tuscania Survivors Association, and a twenty-first-century resurrection of the story back in Baraboo. Trout shows how myth overtook messy reality, and how private grief often resisted public pageantry. Trout's narrative is a riveting, deeply researched investigation that showcases the meaning for Americans of a nearly forgotten disaster, and the unbreakable ties of transatlantic remembrance that it left behind.



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