Project MUSE®: Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1979-1980) through current issueLatest Articles: Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies3065-66640277-8726Latest articles in Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“A Cypress Tree for Each Dead”: The Unique Gravemarker in Istanbul’s Skyline and Visual Urban Representations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988016
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Frontispiece. Gravestone with a cypress tree motif, Eyüp Mosque graveyard, 2023. Photograph by the author.A peculiar structure in Matthäus Merian’s renowned 1635 panorama captured my attention while researching the ancient land walls of Istanbul and tracing their imprints in the city’s visual representations (Figure 1). From amid the walls, a towering multi-story edifice stood, crowned with a dense canopy of cypress trees. As an architectural historian, I was surprised by my own unfamiliarity with this prominent structure, which must have either crumbled over time or faded into obscurity, as it was absent from the contemporary cityscape. Scouring my sources, I found no mention of such an edifice. I briefly wondered
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmall“A Cypress Tree for Each Dead”: The Unique Gravemarker in Istanbul’s Skyline and Visual Urban Representations2026-04-15text/htmlen-US“A Cypress Tree for Each Dead”: The Unique Gravemarker in Istanbul’s Skyline and Visual Urban Representations2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®1380482026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Monuments and Memory: Archaeological Perspectives on Commemoration ed. by John H. Jameson, Sherene Baugher, and Richard Veit (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988017
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The last decade has witnessed a veritable glut in scholarship addressing the challenges and controversies associated with monuments and memorialization in the United States. The public memory of the Civil War, and more particularly monuments associated with the former Confederacy, has received the lion’s share of attention. Rightly so, given the controversies attached to such monuments, but this has meant that commemorative objects and spaces associated with other historical conflicts, social movements, and significant people have remained underrepresented within the extant literature. As such, Monuments and Memory: Archaeological Perspectives on Commemoration, a collection of essays edited by John H. Jameson
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallMonuments and Memory: Archaeological Perspectives on Commemoration ed. by John H. Jameson, Sherene Baugher, and Richard Veit (review)2026-04-15text/htmlen-USMonuments and Memory: Archaeological Perspectives on Commemoration ed. by John H. Jameson, Sherene Baugher, and Richard Veit (review)2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®88062026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Cemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds by Adam Rosenblatt (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988018
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Adam Rosenblatt, associate professor of practice at Duke University, describes his book as “activist anthropology” (as noted in his LinkedIn promotion and on the back cover). The term proves fitting as the narrative unfolds and Rosenblatt embeds himself in the world of what he calls “Cemetery Citizens.”Who are Cemetery Citizens? According to Rosenblatt, they are “people who found themselves in a place where the dead seemed abandoned— maybe not by the people who loved them, but by the surrounding world. They asked questions and got curious . . . soon their questions became projects” (2). As someone who also identifies as a Cemetery Citizen, I found this work deeply resonant and thought-provoking.The book situates
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallCemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds by Adam Rosenblatt (review)2026-04-15text/htmlen-USCemetery Citizens: Reclaiming the Past and Working for Justice in American Burial Grounds by Adam Rosenblatt (review)2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®75682026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America by Joy M. Giguere (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988019
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Giguere opens with Dell Upton’s “reform cemeteries” — their chartering as corporations perhaps more innovative than their geometric “neoclassical grid” (44). The first was New Haven’s Grove Street Cemetery in 1796. Paris had experienced similar problems with disease and overcrowding, and in 1804, the Republic assumed civil control over burial and opened Père Lachaise, rejecting French geometric horticultural traditions for a picturesque English country park design. Though eventually overrun with family tombs and enlarged by rectilinear accretions it became the prototype for the North American “rural cemetery” though not immediately taken up. Giguere highlights the debates inspired by public health crises in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallPleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America by Joy M. Giguere (review)2026-04-15text/htmlen-USPleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America by Joy M. Giguere (review)2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®92502026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Dying Impoverished: The Funerary Rites, Gravestones, and Cemeteries of the Poor
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988014
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Frontispiece. Pauper’s Section left half of photo, Thornrose Cemetery, Staunton, November 2, 2024. Photograph by the author.A once widespread American social assistance program has its surprising roots in the forty-third year of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. That year, 1601, the “Acte for the Reliefe of the Poore” was passed and served as the foundation for centuries of care for and supervision of impoverished citizens. In Britain, church parishes were the administrative units responsible for poor relief, but the system evolved to include almshouses and workhouses (for paupers who were able-bodied). It even included apprenticeships for poor children.1The British colonies in America replicated many aspects of this
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallDying Impoverished: The Funerary Rites, Gravestones, and Cemeteries of the Poor2026-04-15text/htmlen-USDying Impoverished: The Funerary Rites, Gravestones, and Cemeteries of the Poor2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®880782026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Editor’s Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988011
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This volume of Markers includes four feature articles and five book reviews, tapping into scholarship that ranges, in the feature articles, from the examination of a newly discovered nineteenth- century carver from south central Tennessee to cypresses as an indicator of graveyards in views and maps of Istanbul, Turkey. The book reviews, a recent and recurring addition to Markers, also investigate a variety of recent scholarship, part of our effort to inform readers of the important publications in the field. They are similarly characterized by their range, from the first scholarly English language book on Italy’s monumental cemeteries to a study of Cemetery Citizens, the activists who dedicate their time to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallEditor’s Introduction2026-04-15text/htmlen-USEditor’s Introduction2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®95222026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15James Stevens Curl
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988012
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The architectural historian Dr. James Stevens Curl died in November 2025 at the age of eighty-eight.An Ulsterman, he trained as an architect at what was then the Oxford School of Architecture, and then as a town planner, before becoming an architectural historian, working in the 1970s for the Survey of London. His PhD at University College, London, was on the Victorian architect Henry Roberts, known for his model housing for the working classes.He was an extraordinarily prolific writer of scholarly works, including the useful Oxford Dictionary of Architecture (Oxford University Press, 1999, second edition 2006) and the Art and Architecture of Freemasonry (Batsford, London, 1991).He was a man of forceful views and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallJames Stevens Curl2026-04-15text/htmlen-USJames Stevens Curl2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®27452026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15In Memory of Cader Baucom Jr., Stone Carver
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988013
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Frontispiece. Hannah Patterson, 1847, Old Mars Hill Cemetery, Cornersville. Typical cemetery mourner scene motif. Photograph by the author.About halfway between Nashville and the Alabama state line in Marshall County, Tennessee, stands a tombstone unusual for this area and time period— one emblazoned in the lower left with a bold carver signature, “C. Baucom.” It is on a rather ordinary tablet headstone with an 1857 death date in the Old Mars Hill Presbyterian Church graveyard established in 1825, one of the oldest burial grounds in the area (Figure 1). In rural Middle Tennessee during the pioneer period (1790s–1830s), grave markers for people not among the wealthy elite were typically rough field stones with no
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallIn Memory of Cader Baucom Jr., Stone Carver2026-04-15text/htmlen-USIn Memory of Cader Baucom Jr., Stone Carver2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®970852026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15A Place for Memory: Baltimore’s Historic Laurel Cemetery ed. by Isaac Shearn and Elgin Klugh (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988020
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The story of Laurel Cemetery, a historic African American cemetery in Baltimore that was demolished in 1958 and replaced by a shopping mall, is a tragically familiar one, proving that Mark Twain was right that while history does not repeat itself, it often rhymes.When Laurel Cemetery was incorporated in 1852, Maryland law precluded African Americans from incorporating institutions like cemeteries. Consequently, the incorporators and subsequent owners were white, disconnecting its ownership from its constituency from the very start. Evidence suggests that it was still active into the 1940s, although the space was compromised as early as 1931 when a gas station opened on part of the grounds. Descendants of people
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallA Place for Memory: Baltimore’s Historic Laurel Cemetery ed. by Isaac Shearn and Elgin Klugh (review)2026-04-15text/htmlen-USA Place for Memory: Baltimore’s Historic Laurel Cemetery ed. by Isaac Shearn and Elgin Klugh (review)2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®48462026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Restoring Their Honor: Image Forensics Identifies Lost Graves of Union Soldiers
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988015
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Frontispiece. Headboard of Henry E. S. Grimston, January 7, 1863. Left image enhanced with black lettering. Public domain.In order to be able to carry out instructions which I have received directing the re-numbering and marking names on headboards from which original painting is effaced, it is necessary that I have those records to refer to in order to find out names of dead, from whose headboards all marks of identity are obliterated.The identification of the dead can be lost to time due to the impermanence of the materials used for marking gravesites. Nineteenth-century photographic and documentary evidence from the United States Army’s post cemetery at St. Augustine, Florida, show the early use of wooden
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallRestoring Their Honor: Image Forensics Identifies Lost Graves of Union Soldiers2026-04-15text/htmlen-USRestoring Their Honor: Image Forensics Identifies Lost Graves of Union Soldiers2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®846722026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15Architecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy by Hannah Malone (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988021
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Hannah Malone’s Architecture, Death, and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy is, simply put, a remarkable book. In the first scholarly English-language study of Italy’s grandiose monumental cemeteries, Malone provides deep insight into burial grounds that were unlike any others in the world. Italy’s monumental cemeteries feature vast, geometrically designed cores, incomparable sculpture and architecture, and massive gateways. Initiated primarily in Italy’s north and central regions, the earliest responded to the Napoleonic edict of 1806–09 that forbade burial within city walls while much of Italy was under French rule. Malone uses a microhistorical and case study approach to introduce
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallArchitecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy by Hannah Malone (review)2026-04-15text/htmlen-USArchitecture, Death and Nationhood: Monumental Cemeteries of Nineteenth-Century Italy by Hannah Malone (review)2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®89502026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15The Year’s Work in Cemetery and Gravestone Studies: An International Bibliography
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/988022
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This annual feature of Markers, inaugurated in 1995, is intended to serve as an ongoing, working bibliography of pertinent scholarship in the interdisciplinary field of cemetery and gravemarker studies, including relevant works dealing with cenotaphs, public monuments, and/or memorials. With significant exceptions, since 2004, it has, for the most part, restricted itself to English-language works in the modern era (i.e., post-1500), consisting of books, scholarly articles, and theses and dissertations. Where possible, we have also included the digital object identifier (doi), which can be used to locate the resource online.Excluded from the bibliography are conference presentations, audio-visual materials
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/896/image/coversmallThe Year’s Work in Cemetery and Gravestone Studies: An International Bibliography2026-04-15text/htmlen-USThe Year’s Work in Cemetery and Gravestone Studies: An International Bibliography2026-04-152026TWOProject MUSE®795312026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002026-04-15