Alison Bell is Professor of Anthropology at Washington and Lee University. This interview is based on her new book, The Vital Dead: Making Meaning, Identity, and Community through Cemeteries (University of Tennessee Press, 2023). JF: What led you to write The Vital Dead?...
Michael Trotti is Professor of History at Ithaca College. This interview is based on his new book,The End of Public Execution: Race, Religion, and Punishment in the American South (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What led you to...
I saw this tweet today from presidential historian Michael Beschloss: So I looked it up. Here is a taste of the entry on Washington’s death from the Digital Encyclopedia of George Washington, published by The Fred W. Smith National Library...
Angela Esco Elder is Associate Professor of History at Converse University. This interview is based on her new book, Love and Duty: Confederate Widows and the Emotional Politics of Loss (The University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What led...
Sarah Purcell is L.F. Parker Professor of History at Grinnell College. This interview is based on her new book, Spectacle of Grief: Public Funerals and Memory in the Civil War Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2022). JF: What led...
According to NBC News. The number of deaths due to COVID-19 in the two years the virus has been in the United States is now higher than some of the most liberal estimates of the number of deaths in the...
When was the last time you saw material like this from New York Times opinion writer? Thank you Tish Harrison Warren. A taste: The truth is, no one — not priests, not scientists, not the most ardent atheist, not the...
Over at The New York Times, Ruth Graham has a fascinating piece on Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble of the Daughters of St. Paul convent in Boston. Here is a taste: These days, Sister Aletheia has no shortage of skulls. People...
How does a Christian face death? Timothy Keller, the founding pastor of Redeemer Church in New York City, has been counseling others about death his entire life. As he battles pancreatic cancer he must now start to take some of...
An editor of a magazine or journal sets it ideological course. R.R. Reno, a conservative Catholic, is the editor of First Things. Since it was founded by Richard John Neuhaus in 1990, First Things has been a beacon of the pro-life movement. So...
Shannon Bontrager is Associate Professor of History at Georgia Highlands College. This interview is based on his new book, Death at the Edges of Empire: Fallen Soldiers, Cultural Memory, and the Making of an American Nation, 1863-1921 (University of Nebraska...
Erik Seeman is Professor of History and History Department Chair at the University at Buffalo. This interview is based on his new book, Speaking with the Dead in Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). JF: What led you to write Speaking with...
Brian Dirck is a Professor of History at Anderson University. This interview is based on his new book, The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and Death (Southern Illinois University Press, 2019). JF: What led you to write The Black Heavens: Abraham Lincoln and...
Check out Yale historian Gabriel Winant‘s review of Barbara Ehrenreich‘s new book: Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Our Illusion of Self Control. Here is a taste: Ehrenreich contemplates with some satisfaction not just the approach...
Stepháne Gerson, a historian of France at New York University, lost his eight-year old son on rafting trip on the Utah and Colorado border in 2006. His Chronicle of Higher Education essay, “History in the Face of Catastrophe,” describes how history served...
Jill Lepore writes about them in the October issue of The New York. As the subtitle of her piece notes, “Our mortuary conventions reveal a lot about our relation to the past.” Here is a taste: There are only so many...
It is time to bring Pope Francis’s visit to bear on what happened in Oregon on Thursday. No one seems to be making the obvious connection between the Pope’s message to America last week and the problem of gun violence...
Terri Snyder is Professor of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. This interview is based on her latest book The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America (University of Chicago Press, 2015). JF: What led you to write...
I don’t know if this is real or not, but it is certainly funny. From the Delaware Cape Gazette Here are some highlights: Walter George Bruhl Jr. of Newark and Dewey Beach is a dead person; he is no more; […]
You should be reading the stuff that Wilfred McClay writes. He is one of the best cultural critics writing today. If your new to McClay, start with his Merle Curti Award-winning book The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America....
