Is the Cemetery Dead? Mourning and Commemoration in the 21st Century Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018 The book gets to the heart of the tragedy of death for the survivors, chronicling how Americans are inventing new or adapting old traditions, burial places, and memorials. Sloane shows how people are taking control of their grief [...]
Los Angeles isn't planned; it just happens. Right? Not so fast! Despite the city's reputation for spontaneous evolution, a deliberate planning process shapes the way Los Angeles looks and lives. Editor David C. Sloane has enlisted more than 35 essayists for a lively, richly illustrated view of this vibrant metropolis. Together they cover the influences [...]
Cemeteries in America have gradually changed from churchyards to suburban memorial parks, from sacred refuges to business ventures, and their role as a cherished repository of history and memories has been usurped by historical societies and family albums. This book, illustrated with black and white photographs, traces the cemetery's rich legacy from colonial times to [...]
The worlds of the living and the dead are merging. More Americans (and people around the world) are demanding a more natural process of death, more environmentally responsive places of burial, and, my focus here, personalized commemorations as part of their regular lives. Together, they symbolize, as Tony Walter has written, the “revival of death” … Read More
Abstract An enormous engine that consumes over 14 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP), the health care industry ranges from pharmaceutical and biotechnological companies on the cutting edge of research to family physicians in offices scattered throughout our communities. A recent study showed that the health care industry, in addition to its obvious [...]
Description This article examines the phenomena of invented and reinvented streets, each of which represents an attempt to present a new shopping experience to counter the growing threat of such non-traditional retail formats as mail-order, television, and internet shopping, and the in-home inertia those practices create. Invented streets, such as CityWalk in Universal City and [...]
Description The first suburb, according to historian Kenneth Jackson, grew up outside the ancient city of Ur some 4,000 years ago. For centuries, suburbs were the last resort of the poor, who were unwelcome in the central city, home to the civic elite. Then, gradually, the center-periphery relationship was inverted, with the poor left in [...]
Abstract Ancient cemeteries remind us that humans have been constructing homes for the dead for thousands of years - perhaps as long as we have been constructing houses for the living. Why do we care so deeply about the dead? They represent our past and future, our mortality and our morality. Over the last two [...]
Abstract Miami and Los Angeles have rarely been viewed in tandem. Though they are situated a continent apart, Miami and Los Angeles are perhaps more like each other than like other American cities. At the same time, they retain obvious individual identities. In these "orange empires," urbanization occurred later than in other great American cities. [...]
A renewed interest in public and private commemoration has reshaped the American landscape of memory over the last thirty years. In the public realm, Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial revolutionized the architecture of public monuments, opening a period of invention and innovation. With every new flower and letter that visitors placed along or on it, [...]
