Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-255).

Cannibals, a coffin, and a captain's staff : Colonial Jamestown's original graves reveal America's distinctly uncivilized beginnings -- Pilgrim's progress? : To trace America's long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock -- ...Or give me death : Jewish cemeteries are America's first and most enduring public expressions of religious liberty--which makes them targets for intolerance -- Where the bodies are buried : Southern plantation owners concealed the evidence of their moral crimes by hiding the bones of the enslaved -- Out of the churchyard into the woods : Rural-style cemeteries transformed America's landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled tourist destinations -- Underground art : The Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America's cultural capital -- Death comes equally to us all : racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive -- The tonic of wilderness : How Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country's first conservation project -- A cemetery by any other name : Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan's most active repository for human remains -- Four score and seventy-nine years ago : The Civil War opened the gates to the capitalism of corpses--and death in America has never been the same -- Sweet and fitting to die for one's country : How Arlington National Cemetery's success as a monument to war made Americans too eager to fill it -- Keeping up with the corpses : The way cemeteries set the most for America's suburban subdivisions -- Lasting impressions : Tombstones in old boot hill graveyards keep alive the lost story of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American West -- The Disneyland of graveyards : How a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America -- We didn't start the fire : Cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes -- Leveraging buried assets : Facing an existential threat from DIgital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival -- Back to nature : Green cemeteries return America's burial practices to the country's earliest days.