The American Resting Place

Book excerpt: An illustrated cultural history of America through the lens of its gravestones and burial practices—featuring eighty black-and-white photographs. In The American Resting Place, cultural historian Marilyn Yalom and her son, photographer Reid Yalom, visit more than 250 cemeteries across the United States. Following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the historical pattern of American migration, their destinations highlight America’s cultural and ethnic diversity as well as the evolution of burials rites over the centuries. Yalom’s incisive reading of gravestone inscriptions reveals changing ideas about death and personal identity, as well as how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime, the unique burial rites and funerary symbols found in today’s Native American cultures, and a “lost” Czech community brought uncannily to life in Chicago’s Bohemian National Columbarium. From fascinating past to startling future—DVDs embedded in tombstones, “green” burials, and “the new aesthetic of death”—The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery.