Facing the "King of Terrors": Death and Society in an American Community, 1750-1990 (original) (raw)
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Alexandria Anderson - The American Etiquette of Mourning: The Disappearance of the Crape and Veil
Scholars across a number of different disciplines believe that modern Americans, unlike their Victorian predecessors, live within a death-denying culture. Due to the overwhelming spectacles of death and destruction that occurred during World War I, historians tend to focus on the Great War as the most pivotal period during which public attitudes towards mourning fluctuated. However, there is evidence in etiquette manuals published towards the end of the late Victorian period, and most notably at the turn-of-thecentury, that American society attempted to occlude death and mourning from public view, indicating that society was moving towards a death-denying culture much earlier than World War I. This article considers how turn-of-thecentury American society became increasingly fragmented as traditional sources of authority were rejected and centuries-old practices ceased. These societal changes culminated in a new modern attitude that focused on life and eschewed the doom and gloom previously associated with grief and mourning.
These Horrid Superstitions: Death and Dying amongst the English 'Folk', c.1840-1914
In 1997, Gillian Bennett and Steve Roud of the Folklore Society (FLS) highlighted the resources available to historians of death, dying, funerals and bereavement within the archives of the FLS. They contended that, despite the outdated scholarly apparatus employed by the Victorian and early twentieth century folklorists, the FLS archive nonetheless contains a wealth of valuable, yet largely neglected ethnohistorical data. In 2000, Simpson and Roud remarked that 'There are many books on upper and middle-class funerals [but] [t]here is no single study of folk customs at funerals'. This article is an attempt to remedy this continuing deficiency, drawing upon evidence from Folklore Journal and other contemporary folkloric sources in order to reconstruct working and lower middle-class experiences of the Last Things in later nineteenth-and early twentieth-century England. In so doing, I refer not so much to the well-established narratives of aspirational imitation and conspicuous consumption, but argue that evidence from the folkloric record is testament to the existence of a meaningful, internally consistent 'moral economy' of customary social relationships, not only between bereaved people but also between the living and the newly dead in Victorian and early twentieth-century England.
History is embedded deep within the genome of Death Studies: most, if not all the classic thanatological texts include some degree of historical perspective (or, at least, of nostalgia). Yet until recently, the social and cultural history of death, dying, funerals and bereavement has consistently privileged the experiences of the affluent, literate and leisured upper and middle classes. When working-class funerary customs have received attention from historians at all, they have typically been represented in critical, even hostile terms of conspicuous consumption and the aspirational imitation of social betters, of supposed financial exploitation of the poor by the growing Victorian funeral industry, and of the threat that customs such as waking were perceived to present to public order and decency. Julie-Marie Strange’s Death, Grief and Poverty in Britain (2005) has gone some way toward redressing this historiographical imbalance: by carefully ‘reading the silences’ in the conventional historical sources she presents a considerably more affirmative account of the working-class Victorian and early twentieth-century funeral. My own research takes this approach one step further, by furnishing the Victorian and early-twentieth century working classes with a positive voice within the history of death, dying, funerals and bereavement. Showcasing the often richly detailed, but hitherto largely neglected evidence from British folklore collections of this period, I will demonstrate how vernacular customs such as visiting and waking the deceased, not to mention the all-important funeral tea, facilitated the (re)construction, consolidation and sometimes also contestation of social and emotional relationships between the bereaved; what the celebrated social historian Edward Palmer Thompson might well have termed a ‘moral economy’ of death, dying and bereavement.
Dead Bodies that Matter: Toward a New Ecology of Human Death in American Culture
The Journal of American Culture, 2012
Suzanne Kelly is an independent scholar and an adjunct lecturer in the Women's Studies Program at SUNY New Paltz. She is currently completing a manuscript that looks at the burgeoning natural burial movement in the United States and that calls for an environmental ethic of human death.
A grave subject:" Hollywood Cemetery and the ideology of death in mid-nineteenth century America
2017
During the nineteenth century, Americans began to develop a new relationship with death. Urbanites were less confronted with the constant presence of the dead and dying than they had in the past. A new trend in cemeteries also developed as a result. The Rural Cemetery Movement promoted the idea that the dead should be buried amongst a natural setting that was pleasing and calming to visitors. The first few initial cemeteries were an immediate success, but this was not the case in Richmond, Virginia. Although the developers had grand ideas about their cemetery project, Richmonders opposed the cemetery in the first several years. They feared that the cemetery would stunt the growth of the city or even harm the health of the city's citizens. Over time, however, Richmonders began to accept the cemetery and with this they formed a new understanding of nature that was pleasing and allowed Americans to value natural settings. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation was funded through two institutions: The Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library in Delaware and the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond. I would like to thank the staff at both institutions for their assistance and hospitality. I would also like to thank my advisor, Anne E. Marshall, and dissertation committee, Alison Greene, Jim Giesen, and especially Judy Ridner, for their time and assistance throughout the process. Additionally, many of the professors and staff in the Mississippi State University history department have helped me in numerous ways. A number of my colleagues and friends have also helped me through graduate school by keeping me sane for the most part. These include
Angels' Heads and Weeping Willows: Death in Early America
1979
iVlosT RECENT studies of AmeHca's past can be placed into one of two distinct and sometimes hostile camps. Traditional historians have continued to rely almost exclusively on literary sources of information. As a result, their work has focused on the ideology and attitudes of early Americans. On the other hand, a small group of historians, borrowing heavily from the other social sciences, have undertaken to recreate the behavioral patterns of American society in the past. Though these two approaches are potentially complementary to each other, there has been very little effort made to integrate them. This bifurcation of approaches to the study of American history is quite evident in the recent efforts to analyze the role of death in America. Traditional historians have begun to examine the writings of early Americans in order to recreate their attitudes and images of death. Historical demographers have exploited the censuses and vital records to calculate the incidence and timing of death in early America.
The death culture of Southern Appalachia
Wichita State University. Department of Anthropology, 2018
The region of Southern Appalachia is rich with tradition and custom going back to the inhabitants' homelands. Southern Appalachia is a unique place with a distinct culture formed by immigrating pioneers. Despite opposition from the environment and the Native Americans living in the area at the time, these pioneers created their own communities (Taggart 2006:656-657). The Scotch-Irish formed a large part of these immigrants, and their traditions continue today. However, they were not the only immigrants, and it was only through the combined traditions of multiple ethnicities and the creation of new traditions. These traditions created the distinctive culture among modern Southern Appalachia. One cultural distinction is their death culture. The death culture in Southern Appalachia is intuitive not just of their origins but of the immigrants themselves. This paper will explore the death culture first by outlining the history of the Scotch-Irish immigration into Appalachia, as well as some of the other dominant immigrants. Then, the paper will focus in on aspects of the death culture such as funeral traditions, cemeteries and gravestone patterns, the attitude toward death, and the effects of commercialization in the region.
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture
The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity. Dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry. “Corpse chic” and “skull style” have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book breaks new ground by viewing these phenomena as aspects of a single movement and documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. This book links the mounting demand for images of violent death with dramatic changes in death-related social rituals. It offers a conceptual framework that connects observations of fictional worlds—including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series—with real-world sociocultural practices, analyzing the aesthetic, intellectual, and historical underpinnings of the cult of death. It also places the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement in shaping the current antihumanist atmosphere. https://www.press.umich.edu/9297025/celebration\_of\_death\_in\_contemporary\_culture
Mortality, 2002
This paper explores the commemorative dimensions of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America as embodied in material and visual culture. Focusing in particular on the Oklahoma City National Memorial (dedicated in 2000 and now managed by the US National Park Service) and on temporary shrines constructed near Columbine High School in Littleton, CO (the site of a murderous rampage in 1999), it asks how and why such commemoration is organized-by whom and for whom? What do these practices and ritualsboth seemingly spontaneous public practices and those managed by speci c institutions-reveal about American attitudes toward death and grief? What do they tell us about who (and what) is deemed memorable in their absence, in US history, and in terms of an imagined national future? Indeed, what is the role of memory in the material and visual culture of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America? For most of the past century and until quite recently, the USA was often characterized as a death-denying society in which public discussions of dying, death and bereavement were essentially taboo, and death itself largely relegated to the institutional, private setting of the hospital (80% of Americans, for example, die in hospitals). Contemporary debate surrounding abortion, AIDS, euthanasia and gun control, however, as well as increased popular interest in 'good death', the afterlife and bereavement therapy, suggest the questioning and perhaps the lifting of certain death-related taboos. By extension, visibly public material culture rituals pertaining to death and grief suggest broad and diverse interests in 'reclaiming' death, in making death meaningful on personal, individual levels and challenging an 'American way of death' that has largely been, since the mid-19th century, the purview of medicine, science and technology. This paper speculates on the commemorative dimensions of death, dying and bereavement in contemporary America as embodied in visual and material culture, and in particular at the sites of tragedy and trauma.