This book questions the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along lines of race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing. It asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon, so often taken for granted, can tell us about American history broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, it looks to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the northeast to the Spanish American southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chi ... More

This book questions the tendency among most Americans to separate their dead along lines of race, faith, ethnicity, or social standing. It asks what a deeper exploration of that phenomenon, so often taken for granted, can tell us about American history broadly. Comparative in scope, and regionally diverse, it looks to immigrants, communities of color, the colonized, the enslaved, rich and poor, and religious minorities as they laid their dead to rest in locales spanning the northeast to the Spanish American southwest. Whether African Americans, Muslim or Christian Arabs, Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Jews, Poles, Catholics, Protestants, or various whites of European descent, one thing that united these Americans was a drive to keep their dead apart. While burial spaces have reflected and preserved cultural and communal identity, particularly in a society as diverse as the United States, this collection argues that the invisible and institutional borders built around them (and into them) also tell a powerful story of the ways in which Americans have negotiated race, culture, class, national origin, and religious difference in the United States during its formative century.