'The essays cover a sweeping chronological period from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, and that broad lens makes it possible to trace important themes across the region's history, especially those themes involving the complex function of race in shaping southern attitudes toward death, dying, and the body.' Randy J. Sparks, North Carolina Historical Review
Death and the American South: an introduction Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover; 1. Mutilated bodies, living specters: scalpings and beheadings in the early South Craig Thompson Friend; 2. The usable death: evangelicals, Anglicans, and the politics of dying in the late colonial low country Peter N. Moore; 3. When 'history becomes fable instead of fact': the deaths and resurrections of Virginia's leading revolutionaries Lorri Glover; 4. American mourning: catastrophe, public grief, and the making of civic identity in the early national South Jewel L. Spangler; 5. To claim one's own: death and the body in the daily politics of antebellum slavery Jamie Warren; 6. Nativists and strangers: yellow fever and immigrant mortality in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina Jeff Strickland; 7. 'Cumberer of the earth': suffering and suicide among the faithful in the Civil War South Diane Miller Sommerville; 8. The 'translation' of Lundy Harris: interpreting death out of the confusion of sexuality, violence, and religion in the New South Donald G. Mathews; 9. 'He's only away': condolence literature and the emergence of a modern South Kristine M. McCusker; 10. 'A monument to Judge Lynch': racial violence, symbolic death, and black resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi Jason Morgan Ward; 11. Reframing the Indian dead: removal-era Cherokee graves and the changing landscape of Southern memory Andrew Denson.