Purified by Fire
Regular price
€38.99
1800s
1900s
20th century
A01=Stephen Prothero
afterlife
american culture
american history
Author_Stephen Prothero
Category=JBCC6
Category=JHB
Category=JHBZ
Category=NHK
Category=NHT
Category=QRAC
cremation
cultural anthropology
cultural history
cultural studies
death
environmental
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
fire
funeral
funeral rites
funereal
gilded age
historical
human body
life and death
magazines
mortician
private life
progressive era
public health
public life
readers digest
religion
social change
social history
social studies
transformation
true story
united states history
us history
world history
Product details
- ISBN 9780520236882
- Weight: 499g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2002
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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Just one hundred years ago, Americans almost universally condemned cremation. Today, nearly one-quarter of Americans choose to be cremated. The practice has gained wide acceptance as a funeral rite, in both our private and public lives, as the cremations of icons such as John Lennon and John F. Kennedy Jr. show. Purified by Fire tells the fascinating story of cremation's rise from notoriety to legitimacy and takes a provocative new look at important transformations in the American cultural landscape over the last 150 years. Stephen Prothero synthesizes a wide array of previously untapped source material, including newspapers, consumer guides, mortician trade journals, and popular magazines such as Reader's Digest to provide this first historical study of cremation in the United States. He vividly describes many noteworthy events--from the much-criticized first American cremation in 1876 to the death and cremation of Jerry Garcia in the late twentieth century.
From the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era to the baby boomers of today, this book takes us on a tour through American culture and traces our changing attitudes toward death, religion, public health, the body, and the environment.
Stephen Prothero is Associate Professor of Religion at Boston University, coeditor of Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History (1998), author of The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (1997), and coauthor of The Encyclopedia of American Religious History (1996).
