The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds » (None)

MARILYN YALOM is the author of the critically acclaimed Birth of the Chess Queen, A History of the Wife, and A History of the Breast. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband.

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 an acclaimed cultural historian, are unique windows onto our religious, ethnic, and deeply human history as Americans.
The dedicated mother-son team of Marilyn and Reid Yalom visited hundreds of cemeteries to create The American Resting Place, following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the vast historical pattern of American migration.
Yalom’s incisive, often poignant exploration of gravestone inscriptions reveal changing ideas about death and personal identity, and demonstrate 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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

You might expect a book about cemeteries to be morbid, dry or depressing, but The American Resting Place: Four Hundred Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds is an enlivened narrative of the country s expansion and development, as seen through its gravestones, graveyards, and burial practices. Marilyn Yalom, a cultural historian who s previously written A History of the Wife and A History of the Breast, says visits to her mother s grave in Alta Mesa, California, inspired her to write this 320-page book. "At first it was to be the study of only one site -- a year in the life of our cemetery. I would note seasonal changes, various offerings left at different seasons, occasional gatherings in front of ethnically diverse plots, open graves for the newly deceased -- everything that brings life to a landscape devoted to the dead. In time, with a cultural historian s curiosity, I began to ask questions about the broader picture." Over the course of three years, she and her son Reid, a photographer, visited more than 250 cemeteries -- from Boston to New Orleans, Montana to Hawaii. With her words and his photographs, the Yaloms covered a lot of ground, including military cemeteries, long-lost African-American burial grounds, and the recent trend toward "green burials." Nowadays, "even Arlington National Cemetery offers a green option for any qualifying veteran 'through burial of his cremated remains in a biodegradable box in a section of the cemetery without grave markers.' " --Cameron Martin

Photo Portfolio

Preface: Tombstones to Live By

1 Claiming the Land 1

2 Marking the Grave 10

3 Solidarity in the Cemetery 28

4 Distancing the Dead 42

5 Death's-Heads and Funeral Gloves: Boston, Massachusetts 52

6 "Gone Are the Living, but the Dead Remain": Newport, Rhode Island 68

7 Cemeteries as Real Estate: New York City 82

8 Plain and Fancy: Philadelphia and Lancaster County 98

9 The Southern Way of Death: South Carolina and Georgia 112

10 New Orleans: Where It's Better to Be Buried above Ground 139

11 Rituals of Remembrance: St. Louis and the Boonslick 151

12 Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in Underground Chicago 170

13 Celebrating the Dead in Polyglot Texas 191

14 California: Missionaries, Miners, Moguls, and Movie Stars 207

15 Who Owns the Bones? Sites and Rites in Hawaii 232

16 National Military Cemeteries 256

17 Old and New Fashions in Death 271

Notes 299

Acknowledgments 315

Selected Bibliography 317

Index 321