The American Resting Place

Four Hundred Years of History through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds

Marilyn Yalom

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780618624270
• eBook ISBN: 9780547345437
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Index

A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z

A

Abbot, Asa, 20

abolitionists, 61, 64, 100

acid rain effects, 271, 295

Adams, John/Abigail, 26

Adams, Samuel, 62

African American graves/traditions: African traditions and, 35, 92, 125, 130, 133, 149; burial ground, Manhattan, 82; Charleston, South Carolina, 122–24; Chicago cemeteries, 171, 173; deceased possessions and, 35, 125, 130, 164; funerals, 80–81; glass inserts use, 127, 128, 129; jazz funerals, 80, 149–50; overview, 35–36; segregation and, 29, 36, 91, 115, 122, 123, 171, 192, 262; shell use, 35, 92, 115, 124, 129, 164; southern cemeteries, 122–25; St. Louis, Missouri, 163–65; stranger burials, 133. See also specific cemeteries

African Americans: afterlife beliefs, 35, 127–28; Brown Fellowship Society for Light-Skinned Blacks, 122, 123, 124; fraternal organizations and, 193; free blacks/Rhode Island, 77–78, 80–81; Freemasons and, 61; names/naming of, 132; Society for Free Blacks of Dark Complexion, 123

African American slaves: Boston and, 61; burial description, 34–35; Copp’s Hill Burying Ground, Boston, 60–61; funeral description, 34–35; Jamestown and, 5; Laurel Grove Cemetery, Savannah, Georgia, 132–33; marked graves of, 35; names/naming of, 77–78, 132; New Amsterdam/New York, 90–93; Rhode Island and, 35, 68, 77–81; Rhode Island vs. South, 79; “servant” euphemism for, 35, 61, 77, 78; tombstone making by, 79–80; unmarked graves of, 34, 115, 163, 168. See also specific cemeteries

African Burial Ground, Manhattan, 82, 91–93

Afro-Caribbeans, 87

afterlife beliefs: African Americans, 35, 127–28; Jews, 33, 74, 277; Muslims, 40; Native Americans, 277; Rapture literature and, 278; remembrance and, 169; summary, 276–77

Aiken, Conrad, 135

Alaskan natives: burial rituals, 8; reclaiming burial grounds, 8

Alcott, Bronson, 118

Alcott, Louisa May, 47

Alexander, Caecilie A./John, 246

Allen, James, 15

All Saints’ Day, 30, 140–41, 202–3, 206

All Saints Polish National Cemetery, Chicago, 172, 181–82

All Souls’ Day, 30, 180, 202–3, 206

Alsatians, 197–201

Alta Mesa Memorial Park, Palo Alto, xiv-xv, 153, 288–89

Altgeld, John Peter, 175

American Battle Monuments Commission, 267

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, Boston, 237

American Civil Liberties Union, 176

American Revolution: heroes/soldiers...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Frontispiece
• Photo Portfolio
• Preface
• Claiming the Land
• Marking the Grave
• Solidarity in the Cemetery
• Distancing the Dead
• Death’s-Heads and Funeral Gloves
• “Gone are the Living, But the Dead Remain”
• Cemeteries as Real Estate
• Plain and Fancy
• The Southern Way of Death
• New Orleans
• Rituals of Remembrance
• Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in Underground Chicago
• Celebrating the Dead in Polyglot Texas
• California
• Who Owns the Bones?
• National Military Cemeteries
• Old and New Fashions in Death
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH