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Book The Rural Cemetery Movement

Download or read book The Rural Cemetery Movement written by Jeffrey Smith and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study provides a cultural history of cemeteries and their changing role from the 1830s through the early twentieth century. The author examines how cemeteries became places for leisure, communing with nature, and crafting collective memory and analyzes how they served as prototypes for urban planning and city parks.

Book Grave Landscapes

    Book Details:
  • Author : James R. Cothran
  • Publisher : Univ of South Carolina Press
  • Release : 2018-01-31
  • ISBN : 1611177995
  • Pages : 485 pages

Download or read book Grave Landscapes written by James R. Cothran and published by Univ of South Carolina Press. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 485 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Growing urban populations prompted major changes in graveyard location, design, and use During the Industrial Revolution people flocked to American cities. Overcrowding in these areas led to packed urban graveyards that were not only unsightly, but were also a source of public health fears. The solution was a revolutionary new type of American burial ground located in the countryside just beyond the city. This rural cemetery movement, which featured beautifully landscaped grounds and sculptural monuments, is documented by James R. Cothran and Erica Danylchak in Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement. The movement began in Boston, where a group of reformers that included members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society were grappling with the city's mounting burial crisis. Inspired by the naturalistic garden style and melancholy-infused commemorative landscapes that had emerged in Europe, the group established a burial ground outside of Boston on an expansive tract of undulating, wooded land and added meandering roadways, picturesque ponds, ornamental trees and shrubs, and consoling memorials. They named it Mount Auburn and officially dedicated it as a rural cemetery. This groundbreaking endeavor set a powerful precedent that prompted the creation of similarly landscaped rural cemeteries outside of growing cities first in the Northeast, then in the Midwest and South, and later in the West. These burial landscapes became a cultural phenomenon attracting not only mourners seeking solace, but also urbanites seeking relief from the frenetic confines of the city. Rural cemeteries predated America's public parks, and their popularity as picturesque retreats helped propel America's public parks movement. This beautifully illustrated volume features more than 150 historic photographs, stereographs, postcards, engravings, maps, and contemporary images that illuminate the inspiration for rural cemeteries, their physical evolution, and the nature of the landscapes they inspired. Extended profiles of twenty-four rural cemeteries reveal the cursive design features of this distinctive landscape type prior to the American Civil War and its evolution afterward. Grave Landscapes details rural cemetery design characteristics to facilitate their identification and preservation and places rural cemeteries into the broader context of American landscape design to encourage appreciation of their broader influence on the design of public spaces.

Book The Rural Cemetery Movement

Download or read book The Rural Cemetery Movement written by Jeffrey Smith and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-10-23 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Mount Auburn opened as the first “rural” cemetery in the United States in 1831, it represented a new way for Americans to think about burial sites. It broke with conventional notions about graveyards as places to bury and commemorate the dead. Rather, the founders of Mount Auburn and the spate of similar cemeteries that followed over the next three decades before the Civil War created institutions that they envisioned being used by the living in new ways. Cemeteries became places for leisure, communing with nature, and creating a version of collective memory. In fact, these cemeteries reflected changing values and attitudes of Americans spanning much of the nineteenth century. In the process, they became paradoxical: they were “rural” yet urban, natural yet designed, artistic yet industrial, commemorating the dead yet used by the living. The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America breaks new ground in the history of cemeteries in the nineteenth century. This book examines these “rural” cemeteries modeled after Mount Auburn that were founded between the 1830s and 1850s. As such, it provides a new way of thinking about these spaces and new paradigm for seeing and visiting them. While they fulfilled the sacred function of burial, they were first and foremost businesses. The landscape and design, regulation of gravestones, appearance, and rhetoric furthered their role as a business that provided necessary services in cities that went well beyond merely burying bodies. They provided urban green spaces and respites from urban life, established institutions where people could craft their roles in collective memory, and served as prototypes for both urban planning and city parks. These cemeteries grew and thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century; for most, the majority of their burials came before 1910. This expansion of cemeteries coincided with profound urban growth in the United States. Unlike their predecessors, founders of these burial grounds intended them to be used in many ways that reflected their views and values about nature, life and death, and relationships. Emphasis on worldly accomplishments increased with industrialization and growth in the United States, which was reflected in changing ways people commemorated their dead during the period under this study. Thus, these cemeteries are a prism through which to understand the values, attitudes, and culture of urban America from mid-century through the Progressive Era.

Book Elmwood Endures

Download or read book Elmwood Endures written by Michael S. Franck and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elmwood Endures provides a visual journey of the cemetery's history and landscape. The guidebook features nearly one hundred photographs, along with brief biographies of notable occupants who make up a virtual who's who in Detroit history. Many of those buried--governors, explorers, doctors, mayors, inventors, senators, civil rights leaders, distillers and brewmasters, and civil war generals--helped found and shape the city.

Book Death and Rebirth in a Southern City

Download or read book Death and Rebirth in a Southern City written by Ryan K. Smith and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-11-17 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.

Book Park and Cemetery and Landscape Gardening

Download or read book Park and Cemetery and Landscape Gardening written by and published by . This book was released on 1909 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Silent City on a Hill

    Book Details:
  • Author : Blanche Linden-Ward
  • Publisher :
  • Release : 2015-12-18
  • ISBN : 9780814253359
  • Pages : 0 pages

Download or read book Silent City on a Hill written by Blanche Linden-Ward and published by . This book was released on 2015-12-18 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The group of prominent Bostonians who founded Mount Auburn in 1831 had many motives. Although their criticism of urban burials in the name of public health had been to no avail in obtaining public support, the removal of new burials from the center of the expanding city eliminated a particularly bothersome nuisance to real estate developers and urban boosters. By creating a picturesque "rural" cemetery within easy distance from the city center, Mount Auburn's founders solved an urban land use problem while establishing a multifunctional cultural institution where they could attempt to improve experimental horticulture, cultivate taste for fine art and architecture, and, most importantly, shape a usable past in the aesthetic terms then in international vogue. Silent City on a Hill traces Mount Auburn's inception, development, and influence on the urban cemetery and landscape movements, and its many illustrations show what the original visitors to the cemetery saw. Blanche Linden-Ward is Assistant Professor and Coordinator of the American Culture and Communication Program at Emerson College.

Book Modern Park Cemeteries

Download or read book Modern Park Cemeteries written by Howard Evarts Weed and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Dust to Dust

    Book Details:
  • Author : Allan Amanik
  • Publisher : NYU Press
  • Release : 2019-12-24
  • ISBN : 1479800805
  • Pages : 272 pages

Download or read book Dust to Dust written by Allan Amanik and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2019-12-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revealing look at how death and burial practices influence the living Dust to Dust offers a three-hundred-year history of Jewish life in New York, literally from the ground up. Taking Jewish cemeteries as its subject matter, it follows the ways that Jewish New Yorkers have planned for death and burial from their earliest arrival in New Amsterdam to the twentieth century. Allan Amanik charts a remarkable reciprocity among Jewish funerary provisions and the workings of family and communal life, tracing how financial and family concerns in death came to equal earlier priorities rooted in tradition and communal cohesion. At the same time, he shows how shifting emphases in death gave average Jewish families the ability to advocate for greater protections and entitlements such as widows’ benefits and funeral insurance. Amanik ultimately concludes that planning for life’s end helps to shape social systems in ways that often go unrecognized.

Book Green wood Illustrated

Download or read book Green wood Illustrated written by Nehemiah Cleaveland and published by . This book was released on 1847 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book American Afterlife

    Book Details:
  • Author : Kate Sweeney
  • Publisher : University of Georgia Press
  • Release : 2014-03-15
  • ISBN : 0820346896
  • Pages : 232 pages

Download or read book American Afterlife written by Kate Sweeney and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2014-03-15 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning writer explores the patchwork American cultural history of grieving the departed. One family inters their matriarch’s ashes on the floor of the ocean. Another holds a memorial weenie roast each year at a green-burial cemetery. An 1898 ad for embalming fluid promises, “You can make mummies with it!” while a leading contemporary burial vault is touted as impervious to the elements. A grieving mother, 150 years ago, might spend her days tending a garden at her daughter’s grave. Today, she might tend the roadside memorial she erected where her daughter was killed. One mother wears a locket containing her daughter’s hair; the other, a necklace containing her ashes. What happens after someone dies depends on our personal stories and on where those stories fall in a larger tale―that of death in America. It’s a powerful tale that we usually keep hidden from our everyday lives until we have to face it. American Afterlife by Kate Sweeney reveals this world through a collective portrait of Americans past and present who are personally involved with death: obit writers in the desert, an Atlantic funeral voyage, a fourth-generation funeral director―even a midwestern museum that shows us our death-obsessed Victorian progenitors. Each story illuminates details in another, revealing a landscape that feels at once strange and familiar, one that’s by turns odd, tragic, poignant, and sometimes even funny. “Sweeney’s quest for the “why” behind mourning rituals has given us a book in the best tradition of narrative journalism.”—Jessica Handler, author of Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing about Grief and Loss

Book A History of the Vale

Download or read book A History of the Vale written by Don Rittner and published by . This book was released on 2016-05-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schenectady's Vale Cemetery was established in 1857 as part of the "Rural Cemetery Movement" of the early 19th century. When it was originally designed by Burton A. Thomas and John Doyle, it indeed was rural. Expansion of residential and commercial development eventually engulfed the area around the cemetery, and it is now an integral part of the city. Vale is not only a beautiful and well laid out cemetery-it is also a history lesson. Many of the residents buried at Vale made major notable contributions to American history in science, politics, military, literature, education, business and invention, and a host of other disciplines. Laid out among the 33,000 residents at Vale are many names found in history books. Among the millionaires and notables can be found the small business owner, tailor, soldier or iron worker. The book contains chapters on the burial practices during Schenectady's first 200 years of history, the development of The Vale over more than a century, and a description of the various plots, such as the Union College Plot and the African-American Burial Plot. Extensive appendices include short biographies of 101 notable people, as well as a listing of plantings throughout the acreage. Hundreds of photographs and illustrations make this an indispensable narrative to the history of the city that was once known as "The City that Lights and Hauls the World."

Book Foreign Trends in American Gardens

Download or read book Foreign Trends in American Gardens written by Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2017-02-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreign Trends in American Gardens addresses the influence of foreign, designed landscapes on the development of their American counterparts. Including essays from an array of significant scholars in landscape studies, this collection examines topics ranging from the importation of Western and Eastern styles of design and theoretical literature to the adaptation of specific plant types. As the variety of topics and influences discussed demonstrates, the essence of American gardens defies simple definition. Examining the translation, imitation, adaptation, and naturalization of stylistic trends and horticultural specimens into American gardens, the book also dwells on the juxtaposition of the foreign and the native. The volume’s contributors consider the experiences both of immigrants, who contributed through their writing, planting, and design efforts to enhance the character of regional gardens, and of Americans, who traveled abroad and brought back with them a passion for naturalizing exotics for scientific as well as aesthetic reasons. The complexity of American gardens—their combination of the historic and the modern, and of foreign cultures and local values—is also their most distinctive characteristic.

Book Forgotten Bones

Download or read book Forgotten Bones written by Lois Miner Huey and published by Millbrook Press. This book was released on 2015-08 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Details the archaeological discovery of thirteen skeletons in upstate New York that were identified as eighteenth century slaves from the Schuyler farm.

Book Atlanta s Oakland Cemetery

Download or read book Atlanta s Oakland Cemetery written by Ren Davis and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through engaging narrative, rich photography, archival images and detailed maps, a versatile guide to Atlanta's oldest public cemetery is a great way to tour the cemetery's landscape of remembrance, as well as a unique way to explore Atlanta's history. Original.

Book Is the Cemetery Dead

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Charles Sloane
  • Publisher : University of Chicago Press
  • Release : 2018-04-25
  • ISBN : 022653958X
  • Pages : 285 pages

Download or read book Is the Cemetery Dead written by David Charles Sloane and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-04-25 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Examines our evolving mourning rituals, specifically in relationship to cemeteries . . . a levelheaded report on the death care industry.” —Los Angeles Review of Books In modern society, we have professionalized our care for the dying and deceased in hospitals and hospices, churches and funeral homes, cemeteries and mausoleums to aid dazed and disoriented mourners. But these formal institutions can be alienating and cold, leaving people craving a more humane mourning and burial process. The burial treatment itself has come to be seen as wasteful and harmful—marked by chemicals, plush caskets, and manicured greens. Today’s bereaved are therefore increasingly turning away from the old ways of death and searching for a more personalized, environmentally responsible, and ethical means of grief. Is the Cemetery Dead? gets to the heart of the tragedy of death, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. In illustrative prose, David Charles Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief by bringing their relatives home to die, interring them in natural burial grounds, mourning them online, or memorializing them streetside with a shrine, ghost bike, or RIP mural. Today’s mourners are increasingly breaking free of conventions to better embrace the person they want to remember. As Sloane shows, these changes threaten the future of the cemetery, causing cemeteries to seek to become more responsive institutions. A trained historian, Sloane is also descendent from multiple generations of cemetery managers and he grew up in Syracuse’s Oakwood Cemetery. Enriched by these experiences, as well as his personal struggles with overwhelming grief, Sloane presents a remarkable and accessible tour of our new American way of death.