In 2006, a dispute broke out regarding an initiative by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles (backed by Israeli authorities) to construct a Museum of Tolerance (MoT) in West Jerusalem. The ...museum was to be built on a plot of land that in the past had been part of the historic Muslim Mamilla Cemetery. Debate centered on whether construction of a museum dedicated to human dignity on Muslim cemeterial land was justified. Yitzhak Reiter presents the public and legal dilemmas at the individual level, the political level, and at the universal level, integrating a multidisciplinary approach involving history, identity politics, and conflict resolution. The Mamilla dispute reflects a microcosm of conflicts over religious and national symbols of cultural heritage as well as Jewish majority-Arab minority tensions within Israel.
The boy sleeping under the bridge hears slippers shuffling the bridge hears a woman's cry. The man on the bridge hears the train on the track, hears a voice calling, footsteps dragging.
Between 1801 and 1871 the population of England grew at an unprecedented rate. This increase in population led to a major problem for towns across the country, which was how to dispose of their dead. ...This was a particular issue in industrial towns in the North West of England such as Liverpool and Manchester, which had some of the worst mortality rates outside London. Using Manchester as a case study and then expanding to other towns in the North West, such as Chester, Liverpool, Wigan and Preston, the first part of this thesis looks at who controlled the burial of the dead from 1820 to 1870. In order to achieve this, the thesis will analyse and compare the history of burial provisions in the North West. This was a time when new forms of burial provisions, such as cemeteries, joined traditional places of burial such as churchyards as sites for burying the urban dead. The comparative analysis examines the complex reasons why burial sites developed and declined in this period. Its findings complement and contest current work in the field of burial practices, especially by highlighting the diverse nature of local burial provisions. The second part of the thesis focuses more specifically, on what happened post 1850, when local government took a more active role in providing cemeteries to bury the dead in the form of the municipal cemetery. It uses neglected municipal cemetery sources such as grave receipts, to add new understanding of those buried in such cemeteries, especially those buried public graves, including children. The thesis challenges much current research into Victorian burials, arguing that the public (or mass) grave was the most popular grave in these northern cemeteries. It gives novel insights into the role of women in the burial process, illustrates the diverse nature of urban burial provisions in North West England and raises questions which could usefully be applied to other regions. Most significantly, it demonstrates how historians have misunderstood important aspects of working-class attitudes towards death and burials, especially in relation to pauper burials.
Even in the midst of the Civil War, its battlefields were being dedicated as hallowed ground. Today, those sites are among the most visited places in the United States. In contrast, the battlegrounds ...of the Revolutionary War had seemingly been forgotten in the aftermath of the conflict in which the nation forged its independence. Decades after the signing of the Constitution, the battlefields of Yorktown, Saratoga, Fort Moultrie, Ticonderoga, Guilford Courthouse, Kings Mountain, and Cowpens, among others, were unmarked except for crumbling forts and overgrown ramparts. Not until the late 1820s did Americans begin to recognize the importance of these places.
InMemories of War, Thomas A. Chambers recounts America's rediscovery of its early national history through the rise of battlefield tourism in the first half of the nineteenth century. Travelers in this period, Chambers finds, wanted more than recitations of regimental movements when they visited battlefields; they desired experiences that evoked strong emotions and leant meaning to the bleached bones and decaying fortifications of a past age. Chambers traces this impulse through efforts to commemorate Braddock's Field and Ticonderoga, the cultivated landscapes masking the violent past of the Hudson River valley, the overgrown ramparts of Southern war sites, and the scenic vistas at War of 1812 battlefields along the Niagara River. Describing a progression from neglect to the Romantic embrace of the landscape and then to ritualized remembrance, Chambers brings his narrative up to the beginning of the Civil War, during and after which the memorialization of such sites became routine, assuming significant political and cultural power in the American imagination.
Every year tens of thousands of Australians make their pilgrimages to Gallipoli, France and other killing fields of the Great War. It is a journey steeped in history. Some go in search of family ...memory, seeking the grave of a soldier lost a lifetime ago. For others, Anzac pilgrimage has become a rite of passage, a statement of what it means to be Australian. This book, first published in 2006, explores the memory of the Great War through the historical experience of pilgrimage. It examines the significance these 'sacred sites' have acquired in the hearts and minds of successive generations and charts the complex responses of young and old, soldier and civilian, the pilgrims of the 1920s and today's backpacker travellers. This book gives voice to history, retrieving a bitter-sweet testimony through interviews, surveys and a rich archival record. Innovative, courageous and often deeply moving, it explains why the Anzac legend still captivates Australians.
Richmond, Virginia, the former capital of the Confederacy, holds one of the most dramatic landscapes of death in the nation. Its burial grounds show the sweep of Southern history on an epic scale, ...from the earliest English encounters with the Powhatan at the falls of the James River through slavery, the Civil War, and the long reckoning that followed. And while the region's deathways and burial practices have developed in surprising directions over these centuries, one element has remained stubbornly the same: the color line. But something different is happening now. The latest phase of this history points to a quiet revolution taking place in Virginia and beyond. Where white leaders long bolstered their heritage and authority with a disregard for the graves of the disenfranchised, today activist groups have stepped forward to reorganize and reclaim the commemorative landscape for the remains of people of color and religious minorities.
In Death and Rebirth in a Southern City, Ryan K. Smith explores more than a dozen of Richmond's most historically and culturally significant cemeteries. He traces the disparities between those grounds which have been well-maintained, preserving the legacies of privileged whites, and those that have been worn away, dug up, and built over, erasing the memories of African Americans and indigenous tribes. Drawing on extensive oral histories and archival research, Smith unearths the heritage of these marginalized communities and explains what the city must do to conserve these gravesites and bring racial equity to these arenas for public memory. He also shows how the ongoing recovery efforts point to a redefinition of Confederate memory and the possibility of a rebirthed community in the symbolic center of the South.
The book encompasses, among others, St. John's colonial churchyard; African burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom and on Shockoe Hill; Hebrew Cemetery; Hollywood Cemetery, with its 18,000 Confederate dead; Richmond National Cemetery; and Evergreen Cemetery, home to tens of thousands of black burials from the Jim Crow era. Smith's rich analysis of the surviving grounds documents many of these sites for the first time and is enhanced by an accompanying website, www.richmondcemeteries.org. A brilliant example of public history, Death and Rebirth in a Southern City reveals how cemeteries can frame changes in politics and society across time.
Arnos Vale Cemetery has been, until recently, a relatively little-known but unique cemetery amongst the West Country cemeteries. Located on the outskirts of Bristol, which is often referred to as the ...'second' or 'third' city in Britain historically, the cemetery has remained largely undiscovered and unexplored in terms of its history and archaeology. Established by an Act of Parliament in 1837, it continues to be an active site of burial and memorial today, and transcends a 175-year time period, through the Industrial Revolution and two world wars. The aim of this study is to provide detailed analysis and insight into the complexities of developing and maintaining a provincial Victorian garden cemetery. It aims to highlight the important role that this particular site had in terms of exploring cemetery development of those cemeteries that were being designed and constructed during the 1830s. Furthermore, how a surrounding network of local endeavour and activity enabled this and how complex relationships emerge regarding both development of the site and its maintenance over time. To achieve this, this thesis implements innovative theory and methodology that has yet to be applied to cemetery research in any depth of detail through the application of both network theory and necrogeography combined to explore the purpose, intended functions, phenomenology of landscape, and the realities of maintenance.
