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Join historian Edward T. O’Donnell for an engaging talk on the burning of the steamboat General Slocum, the deadliest day in New York City history before September 11.
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More than one thousand New Yorkers perished on June 15,1904 when their steamboat burst into flames on the East River. A panicked and untrained crew, coupled with rotten life preservers and inaccessible lifeboats, turned a small storage room fire into a human tragedy of immense proportions. News of the horror made headlines around the world and elicited an enormous outpouring of sympathy and donations. Later, as evidence of negligence and corruption on the part of the steamer's owners mounted, sympathy turned to outrage and demands for justice that were never fully met. Perhaps most astonishing, it took New Yorkers only a few decades to forget the tragedy.
This program will be augmented with more than one hundred historical images.
Presenter: Edward T. O’Donnell is a history professor at Holy Cross College in Worcester, MA. He is the author of several books, including "Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum" (Random House, 2003), "Henry George and the Crisis of Inequality: Progress and Poverty in the Gilded Age" (Columbia, 2015) and (co-author) "Visions of America: A History of the United States" (Pearson, 2016). From 2016 to 2021 O’Donnell hosted a popular U.S. history podcast, "In The Past Lane" (www.InThePastlane.com). He writes history-themed feature and opinion pieces for the "Washington Post", "Newsweek", and the "New York Times" and appears frequently in documentaries on PBS and the History Channel, most recently in one on Theodore Roosevelt (May 2022).
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