Titanic - 1912

15 April 1912

The sinking of the world’s most famous ship generated three waves of Titanic mania. The first hit popular consciousness immediately after the disaster ...

The First World War, and then the Second quieted the Titanic storm; the loss of hundreds of thousands of men on the battlefields of Europe, the whole-scale destruction of cities and communities around the world, and Hitler’s single-minded plan to wipe out an entire race of people, together with other “undesirables,” placed the sinking of the ship, with its death toll of 1,500, toward the bottom end of the league of global tragedies.

The mid-1950s is generally considered to represent the second wave of Titanic fever. In the midst of the cold war—when there was a perceived threat that, at any moment, the world could end in nuclear Armageddon—the Titanic represented a containable, understandable tragedy. A mist of nostalgia hung over the disaster—nostalgia for a society that maintained fixed roles, in which each man and woman knew his or her place; for a certain gentility, or at least an imagined gentility, by which people behaved according to a strict set of rules; for a tragedy that gave its participants time to consider their fates.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-the-titanic-still-fascinates-us-98137822/