Digging Up Death

With Digging Up the Dead, Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known—yet surprisingly persistent—aspect of American history. Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, Digging Up the Dead reminds us that the stories of American history don’t always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle—over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves—is often just beginning.

A tearaway young man from Norfolk, Astley Cooper (1768-1841) became the world's richest and most famous surgeon. Admired from afar by the Brontës and up close by his student Keats, his success was born of an appetite for bloody revolutions. He set up an international network of bodysnatchers, won the Royal Society's highest prize and boasted to Parliament that there was no one whose body he could not steal. Experimenting on his neighbours' corpses and the living bodies of their stolen pets, his discoveries were as great as his infamy. Caught up in the French Revolution, and in attempts to bring radical democracy to Britain, Cooper nevertheless rose to become surgeon to royals from the Prince Regent to Queen Victoria. Setting the past against his own reactions to autopsies and operations, hospitals and poetry, Burch's Digging Up the Dead is a riveting account of a world of gothic horror as well as fertile idealism.

Reporter Kay Engels gets the scoop of a lifetime when her close friend, an archaeologist, uncovers the remains of a 17th-century tavern buried under a New York City construction site. But when a worker is found dead, Kay knows that there are many parties interested in the find--and willing to go to any lengths to claim its treasures.

The New York Times bestselling author of Dead End Street returns with Nell Pratt discovering one of Philadelphia’s darker buried secrets . . . When a summer intern at the Preservation Society discovers an aged document hidden in the binding of an antique book, Society president Nell Pratt is intrigued by the possibilities: is it a valuable historic document or just a useless scrap of paper? When analysis reveals that it’s a hand-drawn map of one of Philadelphia’s oldest neighborhoods, Nell learns that the area is being excavated for a new real estate development and may hold long-buried secrets from the city’s historic heyday. Determined to get to the bottom of the map’s origin and what it might tell her about the mysterious plot of land, Nell will have to contend with a construction company owner who disappears, a former Society board member who’s harbored a dark secret her entire life, and a remarkable discovery that may have the dead turning over in their graves . . . Praise for the Museum Mysteries: “[The] archival milieu and the foibles of the characters are intriguing, and it’s refreshing to encounter an FBI man who is human, competent, and essential to the plot.” —Publishers Weekly “She’s smart, she’s savvy, and she’s sharp enough to spot what really goes on behind the scenes in museum politics.” —Mary Jane Maffini, author of the Charlotte Adams Mysteries “National Treasure meets The Philadelphia Story in this clever, charming, and sophisticated caper.” —Hank Phillippi Ryan, award-winning author of The Other Woman

Doug Stanhope is one of the most critically acclaimed and stridently unrepentant comedians of his generation. What will surprise some is that he owes so much of his dark and sometimes uncomfortably honest sense of humor to his mother, Bonnie. It was the cartoons in her Hustler magazine issues that molded the beginnings of his comedic journey, long before he was old enough to know what to do with the actual pornography. It was Bonnie who recited Monty Python sketches with him, who introduced him to Richard Pryor at nine years old, and who rescued him from a psychologist when he brought that brand of humor to school. And it was Bonnie who took him along to all of her AA meetings, where Doug undoubtedly found inspiration for his own storytelling. Bonnie's own path from bartending to truck driving, massage therapy, elder abuse, stand-up comedy, and acting never stopped her from being Doug's genuine number one fan. So when her alcoholic, hoarding life finally came to an end many weird adventures later in rural Arizona, it was inevitable that Doug and Bonnie would be together for one last excursion. Digging Up Mother follows Doug's absurd, chaotic, and often obscene life as it intersects with that of his best friend, biggest fan, and love of his life-his mother. And it all starts with her death-one of the most memorable and amazing farewells you will ever read.

A novice family historian, the author sets out to gain a personal perspective on her background. She rapidly realises that to understand her forebears she must gain a greater insight into their world. As she begins to dig more deeply, the dry, academic past of the history books morphs into a fascinating kaleidoscope of conflict and romance, crime and retribution, economic hardship and joyful celebration. Long held family secrets emerge to surprise and intrigue. The resulting stories are unique but universal, ordinary yet extraordinary. For the Carters and the Garretts are people of their time and place, their lives woven into the fabric of the society and the surroundings into which they are born and in which they make their living. They are the people behind the statistics, the individuals who make up the common history. Join the quest to unearth the reality of their everyday lives. From the farms of Dorset and Pembrokeshire to the coal mines, foundries and dockyards of Monmouthshire, from the days of George III to the aftermath of the Second World War, accompany them through the Industrial Revolution, sweeping social change, personal tragedy and triumph to the brink of the modern age.

James Thompson explores the problems of theatre practice in communities affected by war and exclusion. Each chapter or "story" is written in a lively and accessible style and draws on a range of contemporary performance theories.

A legacy of murder three centuries old surfaces on present-day Wall Street when a flock of archaeologists and developers converge on a valuable piece of real estate, drawing Kay Engles into a perilous mystery with ties to her own lineage.