Till Death Do Us Part

American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed

Allan Amanik, Kami Fletcher

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781496827890
• eBook ISBN: 9781496827906
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

Contributions by Allan Amanik, Kelly B. Arehart, Sue Fawn Chung, Kami Fletcher, Rosina Hassoun, James S. Pula, Jeffrey E. Smith, and Martina Will de Chaparro Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed explores the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along communal lines rooted in race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing and asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon can tell us about American history more broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, chapters look to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they buried kith and kin in locales spanning the Northeast to the Spanish American Southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. At times, they did so for internal preference. At others, it was a function of external prejudice. Invisible and institutional borders built around and into ethnic cemeteries also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative centuries.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: “A Beautiful Garden Consecrated to the Lord”: Marriage, Death, and Local Constructions of Citizenship in New York’s Nineteenth-Century Jewish Rural Cemeteries
• Chapter Two: “Death Is Not a Wedding”: The Cemetery as a Polish American Communal Experience
• Chapter Three: An Ocean Apart: Chinese American Segregated Burials
• Chapter Four: Founding Baltimore’s Mount Auburn Cemetery and Its Importance to Understanding African American Burial Rights
• Chapter Five: Till Death Keeps Us Apart: Segregated Cemeteries and Social Values in St. Louis, Missouri
• Chapter Six: “For Interment of White People Only”: Cemetery Superintendents’ Authority and the Wealthy White Protestant Lawn-Park Cemetery, 1886–1920
• Chapter Seven: “In the Grave We Are All Equal”: Northern New Mexican Burial Grounds in the Nineteenth Century
• Chapter Eight: Family, Religion, and Relocations: Arab American Burial Practices
• List of Contributors