mourning

How Walt Whitman became the quintessential poet of disability and death.

A primary source set and teaching guide created by educators.

Our mortuary conventions reveal a lot about our relation to the past.

On July 2, 1881, less than a year after President James Garfield was elected the 20th president of the United States, he was shot by Charles Guiteau.

A century and a half after the Civil War, Mayor Mitch Landrieu asked his city to reexamine its past — and to wrestle with hard truths.

Writer Colin Dickey sets out across America to investigate America's haunted spaces in order to uncover what their ghost stories say about who we were, are, and will be.

On the occasion of Halloween, an exploration of previous generations' fascination with ghosts, spirits, and witches.

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

Gender dynamics on the home front, and the ways in which the Civil War is distinct from other American conflicts.

James Baldwin's dispatch from MLK's funeral foreshadowed an America we may never escape.

Countries have also used their postal systems to fight back against aggression.

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

How researchers analyzed limestone to determine the age and origins of the grave maker, which marked the final resting place of a prominent Jamestown colonist.

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.

A century after three Tejano men were shot to death, the story their family tells is different than the official account. Whose story counts as Texas history?

The SS Eastland disaster and Chicago's ghosts.

As an undercover investigator, Rose Mackenberg unmasked hundreds of America’s fake psychics.

The reflections of Emerson, Thoreau, and William James one finds a characteristically nineteenth-century American sense of resilience and regeneration.

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.

Maintaining the internet data of dead people.

In a century-long tradition, students at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania came together in solidarity to combat illness among their members.

Tracing the life of the author who seemed to be from both everywhere and nowhere.

Lionel Trilling crystallizes the cynical Cold War liberalism that sacrificed idealism for self-restraint.

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.

Two new books ask us to shift our attention away from the white vigilantes of Jim Crow and instead focus on what it meant for the survivors.

A generation is still dying younger than it should—this time, of “natural causes.”

The history of segregation in the Navy — and its abolition — show how to combat institutionalized bigotry.

Class-obsessed consumers found the cold, hard and highly breakable figurines irresistible

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

Back when monarchs had much more power—and news was far from instantaneous—it had major implications in the American colonies.