Fountaindale Public Library

Over my dead body, unearthing the hidden history of Americas cemeteries, Greg Melville

eng

Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-255)

illustrations

no index present

non fiction

Over my dead body

1299143782

Greg Melville

unearthing the hidden history of Americas cemeteries

The summer before his senior year in college, Greg Melville worked as a gravedigger and groundskeeper at the cemetery in his hometown, and thanks to countless hours pushing a mower over the grassy acres, he came to realize what a rich story the place told of his town and its history. Cemeteries across America have mirrored the eras and shaped them. They gave birth to landscape architecture and famous parks; inspired some of our greatest poets and authors; and have ever been used as political tools to shift the country's discourse and as important symbols of the United States' ambition and reach. But between land use and environmental issues, and a rise in the popularity of alternative burial methods, cemeteries as we know them are dying. In this book, a fascinating, often playful, and wide-ranging history of American cemeteries, Melville documents where our dead have been, and where they're going next. This is a cross-country and down-the-centuries tour, with stops in colonial times at Burial Hill in Plymouth, Massachusetts, the early days of the United States at Monticello's African American Graveyard in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the Civil War era at Arlington National Cemetery. We're taken to bustling New York City in the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries on visits to urban cemeteries such as Green-Wood and Woodlawn. We travel west during the postwar boom, to the theme park for the dead that is Los Angeles's Forest Lawn Memorial Park. Along the way we discover crematoriums, natural burials, and even digital immortality. This book weaves sustainability, politics, pop culture, religion, and art to ask what it really means to memorialize. Melville reveals how history is shaped by the dead as well as the living - by those who observe those pasts and carry their lessons into shaping the future

adult