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The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds
The American Resting Place 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds Author:Marilyn Yalom, Reid S. Yalom A sweeping history of America as seen through its gravestones, graveyards, and burial practices, stunningly illustrated with eighty black-and-white photographs. — Cemeteries and burial grounds, as illuminated by acclaimed cultural historian Marilyn Yalom, are unique windows onto our religious, ethnic, and deeply human history as Americans. — This ... more »dedicated mother-son team visited hundreds of cemeteries while developing "The American Resting Place", following a coast-to-coast and north-to-south trajectory that mirrors the vast historic pattern of American immigration.
Yalom delivers incisive, often poignant accounts of how gravestone epigraphs reveal changing ideas about death and personal identity; who is buried next to whom and why; when and why cemeteries are moved; and 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
* burial rites and unique funerary symbols in todays Indian cultures
* a Czech community brought uncannily to life in the crematorium of Chicago's National Bohemian Cemetery
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.« less