Cultural Influence
Charles Ives's Orchestral Set No. 2 concludes with a movement entitled, From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose. It recounts Ives's experience waiting for an elevated train in New York City as the news of the sinking of the Lusitania came through. The passengers assembled on the platform began singing "In The Sweet By and By" in time to a barrel organ which was playing the tune. Echoes of their voices can be heard at the start of the music, and the hymn tune itself appears at the end.
The first published book by H.P. Lovecraft was The Crime of Crimes: Lusitania 1915 (published in Wales), a poem on the sinking of the vessel.
David Butler's novel Lusitania (1982) is a fictionalised account of the sinking, and events leading up to it.
Graham Masterton's 2002 novel Katie Maguire (published as A Terrible Beauty in the UK and Black River in France) includes a scene that claims to find evidence of how British intelligence informed the German admiralty that a wanted murderer was aboard the ship, thus encouraging them to carry out the sinking.
Read more about this topic: Audrey Lawson-Johnston
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or influence:
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
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“If morality had naturally no influence on human passions and actions, it were in vain to take such pains to inculcate it; and nothing would be more fruitless than that multitude of rules and precepts with which all moralists abound.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)