About this item
It was the summer that broke America's heart. In 1915, Chicago commuters were horrified to see the SS Eastland, a massive Lake Michigan steamship, flip over while tied to its dock. More than eight hundred poor factory workers and their children drowned. Twenty-two whole families perished. The nation cried out for justice. Drawing on previously unpublished evidence from the National Archives, Ashes Under Water is the untold story of a mysterious industrial atrocity and how the prosperous, guilty Eastland owners tried to shift the blame to the whistleblower and one true hero on the ship, Engineer Joseph Erickson, a working class immigrant. Against all odds, an attorney down on his luck at the time then stepped in to save him: Clarence Darrow, the future legal star.
About the Author
Michael McCarthy is Emeritus Professor of Applied Linguistics, University of Nottingham, UK. He holds/has held Visiting and Adjunct Professorships at the University of Limerick, Ireland, Newcastle University, UK, and Penn State University, USA. He is an Honorary Professor of the University of Valencia, Spain. He has been involved in the study and teaching of English for 50 years. Since the 1980s he has worked with computerised corpora, investigating the vocabulary and grammar of present-day English, with a focus on everyday spoken language. He is author of more than 50 books and 110 academic articles. He has lived and taught in the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Malaysia.
