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Over my dead body : unearthing the hidden history of America's cemeteries / Greg Melville.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Abrams Press, 2022Copyright date: ©2022Description: 258 pages : illustrations, portraits ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
  • still image
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 1419754858
  • 9781419754852
Subject(s):
Contents:
Cannibals, a coffin, and a captain's staff : Colonial Jamestown's original graves reveal America's distinctly uncivilized beginnings -- Pilgrim's progress? : To trace America's long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock -- ...Or give me death : Jewish cemeteries are America's first and most enduring public expressions of religious liberty--which makes them targets for intolerance -- Where the bodies are buried : Southern plantation owners concealed the evidence of their moral crimes by hiding the bones of the enslaved -- Out of the churchyard into the woods : Rural-style cemeteries transformed America's landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled tourist destinations -- Underground art : The Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America's cultural capital -- Death comes equally to us all : racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive -- The tonic of wilderness : How Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country's first conservation project -- A cemetery by any other name : Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan's most active repository for human remains -- 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 -- 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 -- Keeping up with the corpses : The way cemeteries set the most for America's suburban subdivisions -- Lasting impressions : Tombstones in old boot hill graveyards keep alive the lost story of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West -- The Disneyland of graveyards : How a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America -- We didn't start the fire : Cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes -- Leveraging buried assets : Facing an existential threat from DIgital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival -- Back to nature : Green cemeteries return America's burial practices to the country's earliest days.
Summary: "A lively tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead. 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." -- Amazon.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 306.9 M531 Available 33111010906143
Adult Book Adult Book Northport Library NonFiction 306.9 M531 Available 33111009451002
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Journalist Greg Melville's Over My Dead Body is a lively tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead.



"Astonishing. . . fascinating . . . powerful. . .This clever, sensitive book gives us a new way to think about death, not as the final chapter, but as a window onto life in America." -- New York Times Book Review



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 have also 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--history, sustainability, land use, and more--and what it really means to memorialize.



Locales visited in Over My Dead Body

Shawsheen Cemetery - Bedford, Massachusetts

The 1607 Burial Ground - Historic Jamestowne, Virginia

Burial Hill - Plymouth, Massachusetts

Colonial Jewish Burial Ground - Newport, Rhode Island

Monticello's African American Graveyard - Charlottesville, Virginia

Mount Auburn Cemetery - Cambridge, Massachusetts

Green-Wood Cemetery - Brooklyn, New York

Laurel Grove Cemetery - Savannah, Georgia

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery - Concord, Massachusetts

Central Park - New York, New York

Gettysburg National Cemetery - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Arlington National Cemetery - Arlington, Virginia

Woodlawn Cemetery - Bronx, New York

Boothill Graveyard - Tombhill, Arizona

Forest Lawn Memorial-Park - Glenwood, California

The Chapel of the Chimes - Oakland, California

Hollywood Forever Cemetery - Los Angeles, California

Nature's Sanctuary - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

"A lively tour through the history of US cemeteries that explores how, where, and why we bury our dead. 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." -- Amazon.

Cannibals, a coffin, and a captain's staff : Colonial Jamestown's original graves reveal America's distinctly uncivilized beginnings -- Pilgrim's progress? : To trace America's long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock -- ...Or give me death : Jewish cemeteries are America's first and most enduring public expressions of religious liberty--which makes them targets for intolerance -- Where the bodies are buried : Southern plantation owners concealed the evidence of their moral crimes by hiding the bones of the enslaved -- Out of the churchyard into the woods : Rural-style cemeteries transformed America's landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled tourist destinations -- Underground art : The Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America's cultural capital -- Death comes equally to us all : racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive -- The tonic of wilderness : How Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country's first conservation project -- A cemetery by any other name : Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan's most active repository for human remains -- 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 -- 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 -- Keeping up with the corpses : The way cemeteries set the most for America's suburban subdivisions -- Lasting impressions : Tombstones in old boot hill graveyards keep alive the lost story of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West -- The Disneyland of graveyards : How a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America -- We didn't start the fire : Cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes -- Leveraging buried assets : Facing an existential threat from DIgital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival -- Back to nature : Green cemeteries return America's burial practices to the country's earliest days.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-255).

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