The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds

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Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 15/05/2008 - 461 páginas
An illustrated cultural history of America through the lens of its gravestones and burial practices—featuring eighty black-and-white photographs.

In The American Resting Place, cultural historian Marilyn Yalom and her son, photographer Reid Yalom, visit more than 250 cemeteries across the United States. Following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the historical pattern of American migration, their destinations highlight America’s cultural and ethnic diversity as well as the evolution of burials rites over the centuries.

Yalom’s incisive reading of gravestone inscriptions reveals changing ideas about death and personal identity, as well as how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime, the unique burial rites and funerary symbols found in today’s Native American cultures, and a “lost” Czech community brought uncannily to life in Chicago’s Bohemian National Columbarium.

From fascinating past to startling future—DVDs embedded in tombstones, “green” burials, and “the new aesthetic of death”—The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery.
 

Índice

1 Claiming the Land
1
2 Marking the Grave
10
3 Solidarity in the Cemetery
28
4 Distancing the Dead
42
Boston Massachusetts
52
Newport Rhode Island
68
New York City
82
Philadelphia and Lancaster County
98
South Carolina and Georgia
112
Where Its Better to Be Buried above Ground
139
Photo Insert
1
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Marilyn Yalom is the author of the critically acclaimed Birth of the Chess Queen, A History of the Wife, A History of the Breast, and The American Resting Place.

Reid S. Yalom is a photographer and the author of Colonial Noir: Photographs from Mexico.

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