Table of Contents
Prologue 1
1 Cannibals, A Coffin, and a Captain's Staff 9
Colonial Jamestown's original graves reveal America's distinctly uncivilized beginnings
2 Pilgrim's Progress? 23
To trace America's long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock
3 … Or Give Me Death 37
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 45
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 59
Rural-style cemeteries transformed America's landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled tourist destinations
6 Underground Art 73
The Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America's cultural capital
7 Death Comes Equally to us All 87
Racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive
8 The Tonic of Wildness 99
How Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country's first conservation project
9 A Cemetery by any other Name 107
Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan's most active repository for human remains
10 Four Score and Seventy-Nine Years Ago 117
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 129
How Arlington National Cemetery's success as a monument to war made Americans too eager to fill it
12 Keeping up with the Corpses 147
The way cemeteries set the mold for America's suburban subdivisions
13 Lasting Impressions 163
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 175
How a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America
15 We Didn't Start the Fire 189
Cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes
16 Leveraging Buried Assets 205
Facing an existential threat from Digital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival
17 Back to Nature 219
Green cemeteries return America's burial practices to the country's earliest days
Epilogue 227
Acknowledgments 231
Bibliography 233
Photograph Credits 257
About the Author 259
