The books in this section are usually hardcover and in decent condition, though we'll sometimes offer hard-to-find books in lesser condition at a reduced price. Though we often put images of the book with their original dust jackets, the copies here won't always (or even often) have them. If that is important to you, please call ahead or say so in the order comments!
From the dust jacket:
When you get right down to it: where's the best place to tell your story or state what you stood for?
Average old-time New Englanders and a number of modern ones believed that the logical place to say their say was on their gravestones. Their often stunning frankness has produced three centuries of highly personal comments on religion, politics, death, wars, love, marriage and social change, carved on markers in thousands of cemeteries throughout the region.
OVER THEIR DEAD BODIES is the first collection of its kind to explore this trove chronologically and to present epitaphs within the framework of their times. The result is a fresh approach to Americana whereby these crackling "last words" of everyday people gain in significance without losing their appeal.
A general forward sets the mood of the book and cites the changing fashions in inscriptions from hellfire admonitions ("-they may have lived in fear of their Lord but they did not, in the language of space-age anxiety, run scared") to today's stress on nice-mindedness and reserve ("the age of monuments").
From Thomas C. Mann's extensive collection of tombstone texts more than two hundred are presented and crisply introduced according to four major historical eras: through 1775, 1776-1815, 1816 through the Civil War, and 1871 to the present.
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