The Titanic is said to be unsinkable and it was a time in America that we thought we where unsinkable. Wade believed that the Titanic was an enduring symbol of the twentieth century. Was the he right? That is what we are to find out in this paper. We will figure this out by looking at the connections Wade uses in this book and how and why does he argue that the ship and its subsequent maiden voyage reflect the Gilded Age in America in its entirety. The Titanic was doomed from the beginning.
             First off to help get a better understanding of the book you need a little background of the ship itself. According to Britannic.com the Titanic was one of the largest and most luxurious ships in the world. It had a gross registered tonnage of 46,329 tons, and when fully laden the ship weighed 66,000 tons. The Titanic was 882.5 feet long and 92.5 feet wide at its widest point. It had a double-bottomed hull divided into 16 compartments that were presumed to be watertight. Because four of these could be flooded without endangering the liner's buoyancy, it was considered unsinkable.
             Shortly before midnight on April 14, the ship collided with an iceberg about 400 miles south of Newfoundland, and at least five of its watertight compartments toward the bow were ruptured. The first four of these five compartments filled with water, which pulled down the bow of the ship. The Titanic compartments were not capped at the top, so water from the ruptured forward compartments filled each succeeding compartment aft as the ship's incline brought the bow below the waterline. The ship sank at 2:20 AM April 15. The Titanic had only 1,178 lifeboat spaces for the 2,224 persons aboard, and many of the lifeboats were lowered into the water only partly filled with passengers, thus leaving many people stranded on the sinking ship. As a result, about 1,500 people died.
             The Titanic was an enduring symbol of the twentieth century. During this time Americans t...