ABSTRACT
Death seems so irreducible a reality that sketching its history might seem foolish. How much can death change? Yet death does change, and its changes tell us much about how the culture in which this happens is faring. Death in America changed radically from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. At mid-century, before the spiritual and material changes occasioned by the Civil War, and as industrialization, urban life, and immigration from Europe were altering the texture of life, death was widely regarded as a simple transition. Dying did not mean an unbridgeable separation from the living, and representations of the dead-in memorial photography, cemeteries, and popular literature-all suggested continuity between the living and the dead. By the end of the century the dead had been relegated to a marginal position in culture, and the sense of connection between the living and the dead had been lost. If Americans of 1850 were guilty of “annexing Heaven,”3 those of the turn of the century were exulting in the “dying of death,”4 and celebrating death’s disappearance from their lives. Representations of the dead in this later period-in photographs, funeral practices, and cemetery designsillustrate this alienation between living and dead, and furnish images through which we can think of our current distance from the dead.
