Steamship Nationalism is a cultural, social, and political history of the S.S. Imperator, Vaterland, and Bismarck. This book focuses not on their physical, but on their cultural construction in a variety of contemporaneous media, including the press and advertising, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Mark A. Russell is Associate Professor at the Liberal Arts College of Concordia University in Montreal. He is the author of Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896-1918 (2007).

Introduction; 1. "My field is the world": HAPAG, Hamburg, Germany, and the globe; 2. "One of the greatest marvels devised by the human spirit": The transnational career, image, and appeal of the Imperator-class liners; 3. Picturing the Imperator: Making and debating seagoing monuments in Germany's popular culture; 4. Swimming symbols of German art and design? Aby Warburg, Karl Scheffler, and German modernism at sea; 5. Outdoing Britain at what it did best? The Imperator-class liners in the context of Anglo-German relations; 6. Masterpieces "Made in Germany": The Imperator and Vaterland as ambassadors to the United States; Conclusion; Bibliography.