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Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America

Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America Hardcover - 2001

by Prothero, Stephen

  • Used
  • very good
  • Hardcover

Description

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Hardcover. Very good/very good. Hardcover. 9 1/4" X 6 1/4". xiv, 266pp. Very mild shelf wear to covers, corners, and edges of unclipped dust jacket. Red paper over boards with spine lettered in silver. Pages are clean and unmarked. Binding is sound. ABOUT THIS BOOK: Just one hundred years ago, Americans almost universally condemned cremation. Today, nearly one-quarter of Americans choose to be cremated. The practice has gained wide acceptance as a funeral rite, in both our private and public lives, as the cremations of icons such as John Lennon and John F. Kennedy Jr. show. Purified by Fire tells the fascinating story of cremation's rise from notoriety to legitimacy and takes a provocative new look at important transformations in the American cultural landscape over the last 150 years. Stephen Prothero synthesizes a wide array of previously untapped source material, including newspapers, consumer guides, mortician trade journals, and popular magazines such as Reader's Digest to provide this first historical study of cremation in the United States. He vividly describes many noteworthy events from the much-criticized first American cremation in 1876 to the death and cremation of Jerry Garcia in the late twentieth century. From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era to the baby boomers of today, this book takes us on a tour through American culture and traces our changing attitudes toward death, religion, public health, the body, and the environment.(Publisher).
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Details

  • Title Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America
  • Author Prothero, Stephen
  • Binding Hardcover
  • Edition 1st Edition
  • Condition Used - Very Good
  • Pages 266
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley
  • Date 2001
  • Illustrated Yes
  • Bookseller's Inventory # 6449
  • ISBN 9780520208162 / 0520208161
  • Weight 1.32 lbs (0.60 kg)
  • Dimensions 9.31 x 6.26 x 0.97 in (23.65 x 15.90 x 2.46 cm)
  • Reading level 1340
  • Library of Congress subjects United States - Social life and customs, Public opinion - United States
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 00059005
  • Dewey Decimal Code 393.2

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Underground Books is an online rare and antiquarian bookshop as well as a brick and mortar general bookstore of the same name in downtown Carrollton, Georgia. Sister store Hills & Hamlets Bookshop is located in the nearby planned eco-community of Serenbe. Co-owners Josh Niesse and Megan Bell met in 2011, just 10 days or so after Josh opened the doors of Underground Books, literally underground, several steps below street level in a 100-year-old basement in our historic downtown. Megan, an English student at the University of West Georgia, walked in, fell down the rabbit hole, and never left! Reader, we married in May of 2014, under the book arch that now resides at the bookshop. We are both proud alumni of the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar (CABS), and Megan additionally of Rare Book School at the University of Virginia and of the ABAA Women's Initiative Mentorship Program. We have two open bookshops that carry new, used, bargain, rare, and antiquarian books, as well as our online office, impossible without our incredible team of booksellers, including two fellow CABS graduates, Miranda McMillan and Suzanne Carnes. Like many booksellers with open brick-and-mortar stores, we are passionate generalists, but our specialties are in decorative publisher's cloth bindings; fairy tales, folklore, and mythology; popular science and natural history; the occult; and fine press books.

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First line

ON DECEMBER 6, 1876, IN THE SMALL town of Washington, Pennsylvania, the corpse of Baron Joseph Henry Louis Charles De Palm went up in the flames in an event billed as the first cremation in modern America.

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About the author

Stephen Prothero is Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, coeditor of Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (1998), author of The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (1997), and coauthor of The Encyclopedia of American Religious History (1996).

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