{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"Preserved: A Cultural History of the Funeral Home","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/61168564926b7100124612a7/1715711674224-10973f1a9e3d40ce01e21648bdca3232.jpeg?height=200","description":"

SHOW SPONSOR SHGAPE & The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era:


I have never thought of funeral directors as the preservationists of Gilded Age architecture, but they are. Thanks to Dr. Dean Lampros's cross-disciplinary research on the cultural history of these residential funeral parlours we see the remnants of the Gilded Age in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Dean joins me to discuss his new book, and the amazing research he has compiled.


Essential Reading:


Dean Lampros, Preserved: A Cultural History of the Funeral Home in America (2024).


Recommended Reading:


Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963).


Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire: A History of Cremation in America (2002).


Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (2004).


Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America (2005).


Marilyn Yalom, The American Resting Place: 400 Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds (2008).


Suzanne Smith, To Serve the Living: Funeral Directors and the African American Way of Death (2010).


Michael Rosenow, Death and Dying in the Working Class, 1865 – 1920 (2015).


Caitlin Doughty, From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (2018).

","author_name":"Michael Patrick Cullinane"}