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When Mount Auburn opened as the first “rural” cemetery in the United States in 1831, it represented a new way for Americans to think about burial sites. It broke with conventional notions about graveyards as places to bury and commemorate the dead. Rather, the founders of Mount Auburn and the spate of similar cemeteries that followed over the next three decades before the Civil War created institutions that they envisioned being used by the living in new ways. Cemeteries became places for leisure, communing with nature, and creating a version of collective memory. In fact, these cemeteries reflected changing values and attitudes of Americans spanning much of the nineteenth century. In the process, they became paradoxical: they were “rural” yet urban, natural yet designed, artistic yet industrial, commemorating the dead yet used by the living. The Rural Cemetery Movement: Places of Paradox in Nineteenth-Century America breaks new ground in the history of cemeteries in the nineteenth century. This book examines these “rural” cemeteries modeled after Mount Auburn that were founded between the 1830s and 1850s. As such, it provides a new way of thinking about these spaces and new paradigm for seeing and visiting them. While they fulfilled the sacred function of burial, they were first and foremost businesses. The landscape and design, regulation of gravestones, appearance, and rhetoric furthered their role as a business that provided necessary services in cities that went well beyond merely burying bodies. They provided urban green spaces and respites from urban life, established institutions where people could craft their roles in collective memory, and served as prototypes for both urban planning and city parks. These cemeteries grew and thrived in the second half of the nineteenth century; for most, the majority of their burials came before 1910. This expansion of cemeteries coincided with profound urban growth in the United States. Unlike their predecessors, founders of these burial grounds intended them to be used in many ways that reflected their views and values about nature, life and death, and relationships. Emphasis on worldly accomplishments increased with industrialization and growth in the United States, which was reflected in changing ways people commemorated their dead during the period under this study. Thus, these cemeteries are a prism through which to understand the values, attitudes, and culture of urban America from mid-century through the Progressive Era.
Shortly after 5:00 P.M. on Wednesday, May 27, 1896, a Herculean tornado shattered the St. Louis area. Within twenty minutes, 137 people had perished in St. Louis, with 118 dead across the river in East St. Louis. Along a ten-mile swath of devastation, the tornado destroyed 311 buildings, heavily damaged 7,200 others, and caused significant harm to 1,300 more. Even today, that powerful cyclone of a century ago "remains the single deadliest incident to befall the St. Louis area", according to Tim O'Neil of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who wrote the foreword for this historic reprint of a book originally published by the Cyclone Publishing Company. The Great Cyclone at St. Louis and East St. Louis, May 27, 1896 was compiled and published at a speed that rivals some of today's quickie publications. The Cyclone Publishing Company obtained its copyright in Washington, D.C., on June 5, 1896, only nine days after the tornado had churned like a killer turbine through the two cities. But a disaster in a major metropolis demanded speed. The public was ravenous for news of what the winds had wrought in St. Louis, at the time the nation's fourth largest city. The Great Cyclone is remarkable for more than the speed with which it was published. Filled with interviews and a great array of illustrations, with factual accounts of where the damage occurred, with lists of the dead and injured, and with the colorful descriptive passages popular among newspapers of the day ("Fire King", "Storm King", "Situation sufficiently horrible to unman the hardiest"), this book presents the best available picture of what happened a hundred years ago in St. Louis. It is, as O'Neil says, a "work of reporting from brick-strewn streets".
New Orleans Cemeteries depicts the 'cities of the dead' in all their grandeur and decay, their exquisite artisanship and humble memorials, their voluminous historical accounts of the city and undefinable spiritual qualities. The definitive book on a very curious subject, New Orleans Cemeteries is as intensely visual as it is informative.
African Americans have been part of the story of St. Louis since the city's founding in 1764. Unfortunately, most histories of the city have overlooked or ignored their vital role, allowing their influence and accomplishments to go unrecorded or uncollected; that is, until the publication of Discovering African American St. Louis: A Guide to Historic Sites in 1994. A new and updated 2002 edition is now available to take readers on a fascinating tour of nearly four hundred African American landmarks. From the boyhood home of jazz great Miles Davis in East St. Louis, Illinois, to the site of the house that sparked the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer court case, the maps, photographs, and text of Discovering African American St. Louis record a history that has been neglected for too long. The guidebook covers fourteen regions east and west of the Mississippi that represent St. Louis's rich African American heritage. In the words of historian Gary Kremer, "No one who reads this book and visits and contemplates the places and peoples whose stories it recounts will be able to look at St. Louis in the same way ever again."