No Place in American History: Remembering and Forgetting the Sultana Disaster (2018-2019)
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Description
Elias J. Baker grew up in central Arkansas, receiving his Bachelor's degree in History from Hendrix College in 2009. He earned his Master of Arts degree in History from the University of Mississippi in 2014, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate. His research interests include social and cultural history during the Civil War era and Reconstruction, and Civil War memory. His dissertation examines the history and memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster in April, 1865, focusing on the ways various groups, including survivors, contemporary observers, historians, and fiction writers remembered, commemorated, and politicized the tragedy. The dissertation seeks to expand understanding of the ways memories of disaster and suffering shaped communities and individuals in the generations following the Civil War.
This project examines the historical memory of the Sultana steamboat disaster of April 27, 1865. The Sultana, ferrying recently-released federal prisoners, exploded north of Memphis, killing over 1,700 in the nation’s worst maritime disaster. Contemporaries interpreted the disaster through a variety of lenses, finding evidence of recalcitrant rebels, the heroism of Union soldiers, and critiques of Republican emancipationist wartime policy. Steamboat safety advocates deployed the disaster’s memory to successfully press Radical Republicans for the 1871 Steamboat Act, establishing the nation’s first maritime safety code. The disaster’s survivors gathered at reunions and published personal narratives to secure the Sultana, and the victims’ suffering, in popular memory and official war histories. Despite these efforts, most Americans remained ambivalent about the disaster. Familiar and fascinated with antebellum steamboat explosions, most Americans accepted the Sultana as an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of steam transportation. The 1871 Steamboat Act failed to reduce accidents, as investigators hesitated to assign blame and travelers assumed the risk of disaster. Sultana survivors, though successful in attracting large crowds eager to hear their stories, saw their efforts to memorialize and historicize the disaster frustrated as the American public largely forgot the disaster. This project argues that this forgottenness is the defining feature of the Sultana disaster’s memory. This memory, grounded in a sense of injustice for the victims, finds its meaning in being forgotten in American popular history and memory of the Civil War. The project thus demonstrates the central role played by forgetting in the creation and evolution of historical memory.
Publication Date
4-15-2019
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Recommended Citation
Baker, Eli, "No Place in American History: Remembering and Forgetting the Sultana Disaster (2018-2019)" (2019). McMinn Fellowship. 9.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/mcminn_fellow/9
Comments
Link to dissertation in eGrove