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"When Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb? Is More Than a Trivia Question",,"In the summer of 2006, my best friend and I stumbled upon a book called, Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb. The book summarizes the post-presidential lives of the American Presidents, details their passing and funerals, and finishes with a commentary on each. After reviewing how close many of them were to our apartment in Virginia, we decided to embark on a pilgrimage to the burial sites. What followed has been a decade plus journey throughout the country to the biggest of big cities, New York, to the smallest of small towns, Plymouth Notch, to visit these final resting places.
Each site, like the president memorialized is unique in its own way. Some presidents, like Lincoln, have giant memorials that match their legacies where others, like Coolidge, are the definition of unpretentious. Some, like Washington, are on sprawling plantations. Others, like Van Buren, are in rural cemeteries. This is a testament to the impact that power and privilege play even in death.
Traipsing through countless cemeteries, I have often reflected on the role that memory and memorialization play in our lives. Mixed in with some presidents are people whose stories have long been forgotten or, perhaps worse, were never even told. I wonder: Who are these people? Why are they buried here? What was their life like? Thankfully public historians are actively seeking to rectify this.
When I mention my macabre hobby I inevitably get asked, ""Why?"" The easy answer is that it blends my interest in the presidency and my love of travel. The more philosophical answer? I suppose there is a particular unexpectedness of observing the humanities in a cemetery, yet what is more universally human then death? For it is on these trips with my best friend, other friends, family, and my wife that I have felt the greatest connection to people. Be it laughing with friends on a car trip, eating and connecting with the local townspeople, or meeting and reflecting with other history aficionados.
So who is buried in Grant's tomb? Well, not even Ulysses Grant as he is interred above ground.","Brian Lamb","Who's Buried in Grant's Tomb?: A Tour of Presidential Gravesites",,"Summer 2006","Bradley T. Swain, 38, Social Studies Teacher at West Springfield High School",,,,,,buried-grant-tomb-more-than-trivia-question,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Professional Development ","Discovery,Equality,Gravestones,History,Memorials,Presidents of the United States,Public Spaces",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/527/veteran-1885567_640.jpg,Text,Educators,1,0
"Day of the Living Dead",,"As someone with a profound interest in and curiosity about death culture, I was very excited when visiting family last summer I had the opportunity to visit several cemeteries outside of Denver, Colorado. Headstones can tell us so much about the past and I am endlessly fascinated with them as rich sources of material culture, and taking the time to visit them instills within me a sense of connection to peoples, places, and times that feel so out of reach and foreign. One cemetery in particular, located in an abandoned-ish mining town, gave me more pause than usual. I was caught off guard by just how... active this cemetery is. There were so many gifts left throughout the cemetery, many more than I am used to seeing, particularly where the headstones have been so worn and weathered as to be nearly indecipherable. As I worked my way throughout the cemetery, which had been built into the landscape and not the other way around, I found countless children's toys, coins, and even small works of art left as tokens of respect for those who had passed long ago. This experience instilled in me the notion that the connections that exist between the living and the dead are very real and that our humanity brings us together, with brief fleeting moments and offerings facilitating the very real exchanges between the past and the present for which so many long. ",,"A cemetery",,"Summer 2020","Kendyl M, Schmidt, 34, PhD Student",,,,,,day-living-dead,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Connection,Death,Gravestones,Humanity,Material Culture",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/501/tombstones-3031047_640.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0
"Pleased to Meet You, Lady Elizabeth",,"There she was. Powerful and maternal, she claimed her place at the head of her family, teaching from an open book while her husbands slept elsewhere. We finally ""met"" more than 400 years after her death and burial in this medieval church, and friends of mine who saw my pictures there wondered about my joy at standing in a tomb.
I spent several years studying the life of a 16th century English noblewoman, Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell. When I finally traveled to England as a senior undergraduate researcher, I thought I knew everything there was to know about her, but I was wrong. In England, I saw how her signature changed through time, and how she forged relationships with others through physical writing. I felt her personality in the pages of documents that she wrote or dictated in a way that printed sources could not communicate. I witnessed her devotion to her family when I saw other funeral monuments she had designed. I even crept through her house while people downstairs prepared the great hall for a wedding, which her portrait would look down on as it had countless times before.
But nothing compared to the experience of looking at Elizabeth in the funeral monument of her own design. There, I finally encountered her legacy as closely as possible to the way she had intended. After 400 years of consistent flooding from the Thames, it is unlikely that her physical remains are still in the crypt or even identifiable, but it was almost as though I could feel her presence anyway.
That experience in a quiet countryside chapel has changed the way I think about how we craft our legacies, and it cemented in my mind the idea of historical subjects as people that we are just trying to get to know. ","Lady Elizabeth Cooke Hoby Russell","All Saints Bisham",,"March 2019","Frankie Urrutia-Smith, Graduate Student, 24",,,,,,lady-elizabeth,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"NHC summer residency","England,Family,Gravestones,Monuments,Nobility,Poets,Royal Courts,Women",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/18/490/11306679474_c270781858_w.jpg,Text,"Graduate Student Residents 2021",1,0