There are disasters you remember because they are too big, too loud, too public to forget. Then there are the ones that vanish, not because they didn't matter, but because they happened to the wrong people at the wrong time, in the wrong place. The explosion of the Sultana on April 27, 1865, was one of those.

An estimated 1,168 people died when the overcrowded steamboat blew apart on the Mississippi River near Memphis. It was the worst maritime disaster in American history. Worse than the Titanic, though you wouldn't know it.

I came to it embarrassingly late. I had heard about the disaster before, but it wasn't until I listened to a podcast by Harry Thomason, the Arkansas-born film and television producer, that I understood its scope. His podcast series didn't just recount the facts; it gave voice to the overlooked, restoring human depth to the ledger of loss.

Thomason's work brought the story out of the footnotes and into full view, giving space to the kind of American story that often slips through the cracks--quiet, tragic, and too inconvenient to be commemorated in bronze or marble. After hearing his podcast, I picked up Gene Eric Salecker's recent book, "Destruction of the Steamboat Sultana," an academically rigorous yet accessible account, which deepened the picture. That stuck with me. How does something so huge just fade away?

It turns out there are answers. Painful, sobering ones.

Start with the timing. The Sultana exploded just 13 days after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. That would be enough to bury just about any headline. It gets worse: The day before the explosion, John Wilkes Booth had been found and killed in a Virginia barn. That story dominated newspapers across the country. People were already........

© Arkansas Online