Land of the Dead
Book description
Living in America, we are often confronted by our past. But those in San Francisco literally come face-to-face with it. At the turn of the twentieth century, a 1901 decree ordered the exhumation and relocation of over 150,000 graves in the city - the only major metropolitan city in America…
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Why read it?
1 author picked Land of the Dead as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
This is the first history of death in America that explores the longest cemetery in the world: the Overland Trail that connected the West Coast with America the other side of the Mississippi River. Hamburg explains how the massive number of hastily dug graves along the trail dissolved the mourning rituals practiced in the rest of the country, to be magnified by the cheapness of life in Gold Rush-era California. When San Francisco decided to erase its cemeteries in the 20th century -- despite the graves of its founding fathers -- no trace of respect for the dead remained. This…