For a century and a half, the single most important sea lane in the world was the transatlantic route linking the Old World with the New. For three hundred years, sailing ships sufficed to carry cargoes and people, but the demands of Steam Age business and commerce demanded more regularity. Just as the steam engine had allowed railroads to replace the unpredictability of stagecoaches on land with dependable schedules, steamships promised to bring this reliability to crossing the Atlantic. This is where the story of the Cunard Line began. The greatest influence Cunard would ever have on world events would be the leading role during the last half of the 19th century, when the great migration of millions of emigrants transformed the populations of Europe, the United States, and Canada. Wars devastation came to the Cunard Line with WW1 and WW2, as the power of the German submarine fleet -- built with one purpose in mind, to sever the North Atlantic shipping lanes -- threatened Great Britains very existence. By 1963, more people chose to travel by airplane than by steamship -- and it was the beginning of the end. Sir Winston Churchill observed, "You came into great things by the accident of sea power... By an accident of air power, you will probably cease to exist."

This book documents the creation, from keel laying to christening, of one of the most ambitious passenger vessels of all time, Cunard Line's new flagship, the Queen Mary 2. The story of the Queen Mary 2 is told by noted maritime historian John Maxtone-Graham, whose engaging text takes us through the building of the ship and details its world-class amenities.

Lois Gordon's absorbing biography tells the story of a writer, activist, and cultural icon who embodied the dazzling energy and tumultuous spirit of her age, and whom William Carlos Williams once called "one of the major phenomena of history." Nancy Cunard (1896-1965) led a life that surpasses Hollywood fantasy. The only child of an English baronet (and heir to the Cunard shipping fortune) and an American beauty, Cunard abandoned the world of a celebrated socialite and Jazz Age icon to pursue a lifelong battle against social injustice as a wartime journalist, humanitarian aid worker, and civil rights champion. Cunard fought fascism on the battlefields of Spain and reported firsthand on the atrocities of the French concentration camps. Intelligent and beautiful, she romanced the great writers of her era, including three Nobel Prize winners, and was the inspiration for characters in the works of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, Pablo Neruda, Samuel Beckett, and Ernest Hemingway, among others. Cunard was also a prolific poet, publisher, and translator and, after falling in love with a black American jazz pianist, became deeply committed to fighting for black rights. She edited the controversial anthology Negro, the first comprehensive study of the achievement and plight of blacks around the world. Her contributors included Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Zora Neale Hurston, among scores of others. Cunard's personal life was as complex as her public persona. Her involvement with the civil rights movement led her to be ridiculed and rejected by both family and friends. Throughout her life, she was plagued by insecurities and suffered a series of breakdowns, struggling with a sense of guilt over her promiscuous behavior and her ability to survive so much war and tragedy. Yet Cunard's writings also reveal an immense kindness and wit, as well as her renowned, often flamboyant defiance of prejudiced social conventions. Drawing on diaries, correspondence, historical accounts, and the remembrances of others, Lois Gordon revisits the major movements of the first half of the twentieth century through the life of a truly gifted and extraordinary woman. She also returns Nancy Cunard to her rightful place as a major figure in the historical, social, and artistic events of a critical era.

"With a fascinating mixture of maritime history and contemporary analysis, the author describes the history of the Cunard Line, before saying farewell to the QE2, which will retire to Dubai as a floating hotel in November 2009."--Global Books in Print.

Stunning illustrations to colour in, charting the history and heritage of the Cunard Line

Atlantic Kingdom pays tribute to the Americans who challenged Cunard, the shipping company that held a monopoly on North Atlantic trade routes in the nineteenth century. In an era when civilisation first grappled with large-scale technology and creative industries promised a new standard of living, competition for control over maritime trade was fierce. Cornelius Vanderbilt and P. T. Barnum were among those who battled like mythical gods for control of their domains. These titans of the Atlantic left behind them a wreckage of human lives, lost ships, and squandered fortunes in their failed bids for supremacy of the seas. This book is a clear, succinct, lively, and sure-handed evocation of American maritime enterprise at its zenith.