Shipwreck and Spectacle on the Modern Beach

Abstract

The modern American coast solidified during the decades after the Civil War. Along the increasingly legible, connected, and commercialized beach, savvy entrepreneurs and established business people commodified coastal shipwrecks, turning frequent disasters into mass spectacles. The final chapter examines this modern beach through a detailed analysis of the 1896 wreck of the passenger liner St. Paul. It argues that even though shipwrecks and coasts became increasingly mediated events and places, no master narratives developed—different groups continued to tell different stories based on who they were, where they were, what they knew, how they knew it, and what their motives were. In this way, the beach remained, in the words of historical geographer John Stilgoe, “deliciously intricate, infuriatingly modern, resiliently traditional … ill-defined and essentially undesignated.”