"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. Melville provides a lively tour through the history of US cemeteries, exploring how, where, and why we bury our dead. He takes readers on a cross-country and down-the-cemeteries tour, examining crematoriums, natural burials, and even digital immortality. Melville reveals how history is shaped by the dead as well as the living-- by those who observe these pasts and carry their lessons into shaping the future. -- adapted from jacket

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.