David Charles Sloane
speaker
96 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
David Charles Sloane’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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It was a very functional, practical space. There wasn't a lot of greenery. There wasn't a lot of nature. It was mostly gravestones. And then in the late 18th century, As the cities grow, that begins to put pressure on the churchyards and those older civic cemeteries.
And so people begin to think about how can we slightly suburbanize the dead to create more permanent places. Yeah. And so in 1796, James Hill House was a very popular guy, prominent guy in New Haven says he went to a friend's farm where there was a little family cemetery. It was sort of being taken over by nature. And he goes, that's not good.
Slowly, the city is expanding. The early farms, they might totally disrupt or take down all of the stones and the burials. So let's put everybody in one place where we can have a nonprofit organization that oversees the care of the dead.
But they also might have all sorts of different ways that they handle that family farm.
Very, very long time.
Remember in the early 19th century, mid-19th century, we don't have bacteriology. Right. That's going to come at the end of the century. And so people were very worried about what was known as a miasma. And a miasma was a sort of atmosphere above the city. And there was a sense that a disease could get into a miasma and you could actually get that disease because you're in this miasma.
And so how do you get that miasma? They thought it was from decomposing material. And so the dead are decomposing. So they became a threat. that they would say you died of smallpox or you died of cholera, would you then decompose in a way that would allow cholera to go into this miasma and create a danger? So that's the first thing that happens.
The second thing that happens is romanticism. And romanticism emerges in Europe and then moves through Britain into the United States that nature is beneficial. Beneficial for health reasons, beneficial spiritual reasons, it's beneficial for all sorts of things.
So if you put those two together, then the idea becomes if we suburbanize the dead in a larger place that we can protect and use for a very long time to bury the dead, we protect the living, we protect the dead. And we can use that space, remember it, before... 1860, there's very few public parks in any city in the United States. So we can use that as a recreational area.
No. It would have still been weird. You wouldn't go jogging. You wouldn't throw baseballs. What they did is they got in their carriages and they rode around the cemetery. Flowers, trees, green grass. They're like, this is great. And they might, in some cemeteries, stop and have a picnic at the grave of someone they knew or someone who was famous.
And so you would have this sort of celebrity culture. Oh, wow. And lots and lots of people did this. Over the course of a year, tens of thousands of people would go visit Greenwood in Brooklyn or Mount Auburn in Cambridge.
So that really has to do with the 19th century believed in a closer relationship between living and death. you know, all sorts of ways. I'll give you one very simple way. When a person died, often at home, they would snip pieces of locks of their hair, they would put them in these elaborate creations, and they would put them on the wall of their house.
You know, they'd walk into a house, and in the living room, there'd be a little thing of the young daughter who had died. So, starting in the 1920th century, right, it happens as early as the latter part of the 19th century, really takes off in the middle of the 20th century. Americans begin to really distance themselves from the dead and from death. Why? Why?
Well, cultural trends are one of the most difficult things to parse out.
So part of it is we know that the number of dead is actually declining. Everybody knew somebody who had died in 1900. It's just part of the parcel of life. By 1950, 1960, not so much. The infant mortality rate, for instance, in 1890s New York City is something like 130 per thousand. And by the 1960s, that's going to be in the low teens.
So it's a really different thing. So it's easier to distance yourself. Yeah.
No, it was very intense and very public.
So the classic thing, Victoria. Victoria's beloved husband dies. She never wears anything but black for the rest of her life, right? And this is not unusual. In Italy or in England or in Italian neighborhoods in New York, it wasn't like you were a widow so you were on the open market for marriage. you were grieving for at least a year or two years.
There's whole etiquette books about how long you have to wear black and how you can then move to some parts are black and some parts aren't. I mean, there's a really intimate relationship with death and with the dead.
Yeah, but it's exactly the opposite. Where death becomes less part of your life, you hide more. And where death is really in your life, you actually embrace the realities of death more. Interesting. A quick example, the gay and lesbian community of the 1980s. During the HIV AIDS crisis, yeah. Right? I know people close to me who went to 50 funerals.
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