Episode 144 - Changing Perspectives in Cemetery Landscapes: Rural to Landscape Transition

Jennie and Dianne are joined by first time guest Dr. Joy Giguere to learn how American burial grounds changed from merely Ordinary Extraordinary places of interment, to rural landscapes meant to appear natural and ease the burden of grief, to the streamlined lawn cemeteries we often see today. Dr. Joy M. Giguere is an associate professor of history at Penn State York where she teaches courses in US History, African American history, medical history, the history of technology, the history of death and mourning, and the Civil War era. Her research focuses on American commemorative culture, with particular emphasis on the rural cemetery movement of the 19th century and the public history and memory of the Civil War. She is the author of Characteristically American: Memorial Architecture, National Identity, and the Egyptian Revival (University of Tennessee Press, 2014) and Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America (forthcoming, University of Michigan Press).