The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883
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This fascinating book explores the changing attitudes toward death and the dead in northern Protestant communities during the nineteenth-century. Gary Laderman offers insights into the construction of an "American way of death," illuminating the central role of the Civil War and tracing the birth of the funeral industry in the decades following the war. Drawing on medical histories, religious documents, personal diaries and letters, literature, painting, and photography. Laderman examines the cultural transformations that led to nationally organized death specialists, the practice of embalming, and the commodification of the corpse. These cultural changes included the development of liberal theology, which provided more spiritual views of heaven and the afterlife: the concern for health, which turned those who managed death toward more scientific treatment of bodies: and growing sentimentalism, which produced an increased desire to gaze upon the corpse or to take and keep death photographs. In particular, Laderman focuses on the transforming effect of the Civil War, which presented so many Americans with dead relatives who needed to be recovered, viewed, and given a "proper burial."
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction1Pt. ILiving with the Dead in the Antebellum North: George Washington's Invisible Corpse and the Beaver Hat151Signs of Death222From the Place of Death to the Space of Burial273Simplicity Lost: The Urban Model of Death394The Great Escape515"The Law of Nature": Revisioning Mortality and the Natural Order636Morbid Obsessions73Pt. IIDeath in the Civil War: John Brown's Body and a Soldier's Experiences of Death on the Battlefield897Death During Wartime968"Let the Dead Bury the Dead": The Search for Closure1039National Interests11710"Resurrection Days" and Redemptive Blood12311Disenchantment with the Mortal Remains13612Looking Death in the Face144Epilogue. The Birth of the Death Industry: Abraham Lincoln's Hallowed and Hollowed Body15713The Business of Death in the Late Nineteenth Century164Notes177Bibliography199Index219
