You are the first person that ever called a Steamship overloaded with Civil War Veterans, many of whom were prisoners of war in the south and whom were killed by a broiler explosion, uninteresting. There are still debates as to the cause of the Santana explosion and some Historians who say it was sabotage. The death of the 1100+ has been called the worst maritime disaster in US History. Despite being overloaded, no one was held responsible for the disaster. Hardly uninteresting.
The Eastland disaster with it death of 844 people is the largest loss of Life on the Great Lakes. Again I say that it need to be better known.
Sorry that you find that uninteresting
See, this is the relentless parochialism that makes a certain subset of North Americans infamous across the world. I’m moderately interested in history so I have some knowledge of when the
American Civil War took place, and how significant it is. Most of the worlds population will either assume ‘Civil War’ means
their civil war, or will ask “which civil war?” And if you tell them the American Civil War their knowledge will usually amount to ‘it was a civil war in America” or maybe “The Good The Bad and The Ugly”. So why should anyone outside the US be interested in a disaster that befell a bunch of veterans of another country’s civil war a hundred and fifteen years ago? Sure, a lot of people died, but many many much worse things will have happened much closer to home since then.
Likewise the Great Lakes are probably findable on a map by a decent part of the worlds population, they are kind of easily visible. The proportion of those people who would be surprised to hear that lots of people drowned in those lakes over the years is probably small, and the proportion interested in the specific details of mass drownings over a century ago even smaller. Just for context this oh-so-memorable tragedy occurred 4 days after the start of the battle of Le Linge, an obscure event I had literally never heard of until I went googling dates just now but which accounted for 17,000 people killed over the course of 4 months. So why are these 850 General Electric employees so much more deserving of historical attention than 17,000 French and German soldiers?
To anyone with a sense of perspective these things just blur into the background of historical trivia in which a few events stand out like landmarks, and “repeatable shipping disaster A37b Mk2” really isn’t any more memorable or interesting than “fratricidal eurobattle No 41,872”. Unless of course it is somewhere local, or personal, but then it certainly won’t be universal. We all die sometime, and it most likely won’t be in a way any number of people will remember a hundred years later.
