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: Barbara Mc Dermott
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or influence:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)