Remember the Tuscania

Remember the Tuscania plunges readers into the night of February 5, 1918, when a German U-boat's torpedo found a crowded US 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 seizes on a new rallying cry – "Remember the Tuscania!" – and turns 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.

Steven Trout is Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he teaches courses in twentieth-century American literature, cultural studies, and memory studies. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books.