Death's Histories

There is a trail of macabre and fascinating scholarship that glistens like moonlight through the recent annals of early American life, where historians had hitherto been content to study the dead without, however, devoting much attention to death as such. This neglect began to be remedied in the 1970s, as students of American history came under the influence of the great European historians of death such as Philippe Ariès. Yet notwithstanding some important exceptions—including David E. Stannard's The Puritan Way of Death (1977)—death in America continued to receive only limited and intermittent historical treatment until the early 1990s, when a slew of books representing a wide range of disciplines began to appear. Among them were Mitchell Breitwieser's American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning (1990), David Sloane's The Last Great Necessity (1991), Simon Schama's Dead Certainties (1991), Daniel A. Cohen's Pillars of Salt, Monuments of Grace (1993), Jay Ruby's Secure the Shadow (1995), Sheila Rothman's Living in the Shadow of Death (1995), Gary Laderman's The Sacred Remains (1996), Patricia Cline Cohen's The Murder of Helen Jewett (1998), Karen Halttunen's Murder Most Foul (1998), Jeffrey Hammond's The American Puritan Elegy (2000), Robert Wells's Facing the King of Terrors (2000), and Michael Sappol's A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002).

In often sanguinary and sepulchral detail, this dark syllabus teaches us more than we might have thought it tolerable to know about how and why people died in early America, the ways in which the dying and the dead were treated by the living, their mortuary customs and mourning arts, their attitudes, beliefs, and ideas about death, and their physical remains. Facing this history and the accumulating disjecta membra of generations can be unsettling. Yet for all of its obtrusiveness upon the mortal fears we generally seek to evade, this necrotic turn in early American studies is welcome, for it has not only opened up exciting new areas for research but has also directed fresh critical attention to our various historical practices and the extent to which they either enliven or encrypt the past.

The three books under review—a collection of historical essays, a microhistory, and a historical novel—all contribute new material and insights to the expanding history of death in America. The dozen essays in Mortal Remains are without exception informative and accessible. Killed Strangely is an ingenious synthesis of some original and intensive research. And in reading I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company, one feels the struggle over the stakes of history to be something especially urgent and real—to be, so to speak, a matter of life and death.

In their introduction to Mortal Remains, Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein identify a common goal of the volume's contributors: to "write of life as lived in relation to death as felt" (1). All three books aim at some version of this imperative. Isenberg and Burstein intend that the essays in Mortal Remains show how early Americans "combated personal dissolution and attempted to make sense of their suffering and loss while projecting a future of cultural permanence and spiritual value" (1–2). Elaine Forman Crane, in her account of a late seventeenth-century case of matricide, seeks to uncover and interpret "the confluence of events surrounding the tragedy and the ways in which family, community, and authorities responded" (4). And Brian Hall's intent throughout his novel of Lewis and Clark is, as he puts it in his author's note, to "imagine character traits and unrecorded incidents that [provide] plausible explanations for certain historical questions" (413). For Hall, these include many questions about relations between the living and dead and, centrally, about Meriwether Lewis's suicide.

Little is...