Over My Dead Body Unearthing the Hidden History of America s Cemeteries 1st Edition by Greg Melville 9781647003043 1647003040

Over My Dead Body Unearthing the Hidden History of America s Cemeteries 1st Edition Greg Melville – Ebook Instant Download/Delivery ISBN(s): 9781419754852,1419754858, 9781647003043, 1647003040

Product details:

• ISBN 10: 1647003040
• ISBN 13: 9781647003043
• Author:  Greg Melville

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to hour upon hour of pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Thus was born Melville’s lifelong curiosity with how, where, and why we bury and commemorate our dead.

Melville’s Over My Dead Body is a lively (pun intended) and wide-ranging history of cemeteries, places that have mirrored the passing eras in history but also have shaped it. Cemeteries have given birth to landscape architecture and famous parks, as well as influenced architectural styles. They’ve inspired and motivated some of our greatest poets and authors—Emerson, Whitman, Dickinson. They’ve been used as political tools to shift the country’s discourse and as important symbols of the United States’ ambition and reach.

But they are changing and fading. Embalming and burial is incredibly toxic, and while cremations have just recently surpassed burials in popularity, they’re not great for the environment either. Over My Dead Body explores everything about cemeteries—history, sustainability, land use, and more—and what it really means to memorialize.

Table contents:

1. Cannibals, A Coffin, and A Captain’s Staff: Colonial Jamestown’s original graves reveal America’s distinctly uncivilized beginnings
2. Pilgrim’s Progress?: To trace America’s long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock
3. . . . Or Give Me Death: Jewish cemeteries are America’s first and most enduring public expressions of religious liberty—which makes them targets for intolerance
4. Where the Bodies are Buried: Southern plantation owners concealed the evidence of their moral crimes by hiding the bones of the enslaved
5. Out of the Churchyard, into the Woods: Rural-style cemeteries transformed America’s landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled tourist destinations
6. Underground Art: The Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America’s cultural capital
7. Death Comes Equally to us All: Racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive
8. The Tonic of Wildness: How Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country’s first conservation project
9. A Cemetery by any Other Name: Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan’s most active repository for human remains
10. Four Score and Seventy-Nine Years Ago: The Civil War opened the gates to the capitalism of corpses—and death in America has never been the same
11. Sweet and Fitting to Die for One’s Country: How Arlington National Cemetery’s success as a monument to war made Americans too eager to fill it
12. Keeping up with the Corpses: The way cemeteries set the mold for America’s suburban subdivisions
13. Lasting Impressions: Tombstones in old boot hill graveyards keep alive the lost story of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West
14. The Disneyland of Graveyards: How a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America
15. We didn’t Start the Fire: Cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes
16. Leveraging Buried Assets: Facing an existential threat from Digital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival
17. Back to Nature: Green cemeteries return America’s burial practices to the country’s earliest days

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