funerals

How deathly rituals affect our perception of personal dignity.

The sweet-yet-somber treat was the star of extravagant 19th-century funeral feasts.

Green burials — the long-ago practice of laying loved ones to rest in biodegradable wooden caskets or shrouds, without embalming — are gaining in popularity.

In memory of Martin Luther King Jr, a look back on his funeral.

Political funerals and the tour of Henry Clay's corpse.

Today, mourning attire is subdued and dutiful. It wasn’t always that way.

Decorating graves with flowers, from a Civil War grassroots ritual of remembrance to a national tradition honoring all military dead.

They’ve just been sitting in the dining room all this time.

While he did not die in a war, he can certainly be mourned as a casualty of war—as can the thousands of other veterans who have died by suicide.

How the secular movement underestimated the endurance of religion.

Remembering a year of hell and devastation—the year of the Spanish flu.

The New York-to-Washington train had 21 cars, 700 passengers—and millions of trackside mourners.

In May 1921, President Harding paid tribute to a ship carrying 5,000 fallen Americans returned for burial.

In ACT UP, belonging was not conferred by blood. Care was offered when you joined others on the street with the intent to bring the AIDS crisis to an end.

What does the way we mourn, remember, and care for our dead say about us?

Mabel Wilson discusses the history of racial violence and the continued vandalism and destruction of Black historical memorials in the Deep South.

An early 20th-century scrapbook put together by Company 62 of the New York City Fire Department.

How the “forever business” is changing at New York City’s biggest graveyard.

Ryan White helped challenge existing understandings of the AIDS epidemic. But his story also reinforced arbitrary divisions between the guilty and the innocent.

How the Wakasa stone, a memorial to a Japanese man murdered in a Utah internment camp, became the flash point of a bitter modern dispute.

In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors

While some in the West are squeamish, globally, it's more common than not.

As a versatile but complex hero, King led a life open to interpretation by politicians and activists of all types who fiercely debated his legacy.

Louis Armstrong’s complicated relationship with New Orleans.

On September 4, 1973, an enormous multitude of Chileans poured into the streets of Santiago to back the besieged government of Salvador Allende.

A Filipino woman died after coming to the U.S. to be put on display at the 1904 World's Fair. A Smithsonian anthropologist likely took part of her brain.

The state removed the educational marker after Concord Republicans complained about Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's communist ties.

A new account sheds light on the Ford administration’s war against Sen. Frank Church and his landmark effort to rein in a lawless intelligence community.

Remembering what the Iraq War was like, 20 years later.

How Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, a star-studded cemetery in Los Angeles, corporatized mourning in America.