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Events
Jun. 30 | 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Bode-Pearson Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies due
Jun. 30 | 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize
Nominations for the 2012 Mary C. Turpie Prize for Outstanding Contributions to American Studies Teaching, Advising, and Program Development due
Oct. 1 | Travel Grants for Graduate Students
For submission guidelines, click here
Resources: Abstracts of American Studies Dissertations
By University | By Year
Flood, Karen P. "Contemplating Corpses: The Dead Body in American Culture, 1870-1920," History of American Civilization, Harvard University, May 2001.
The years between 1870 and 1920 were a period of dramatic change and conflict in the treatment of the dead in the United States. A new profession of “funeral directors,” gaining primacy over the memorializing process in urban centers in the North, created “life-like,” “natural-looking” corpses through chemical embalming and cosmetic procedures. At the same time, vocal critics of the funeral industry, including cremation advocates and liberal Protestant ministers, argued that this maintenance and display of the remains was irrational and morbidly sentimental since the true self lay not in the mutable body but in the unchanging, immaterial spirit. This dissertation examines the rhetoric and practices of turn of the century funeral directors, cremationists and liberal ministers, focusing on the specific solutions that each group offered to the problems (material, philosophical, and theological) that corpses presented. These modern “handlers” of the dead shared three common themes: a scientific orientation towards bodily process and the decay of the corpse; the control and transcendence of the body either though scientific interventions or an alternative vision of a static, spiritual self; and a simultaneous critique and redirection of popular sentiment towards the dead. However, only the funeral industry successfully created a new object for sentimental contemplation that offered an enhanced image of individual and class identity at death.
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