| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein, editors. Mortal Remains: Death in Early America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2003. Pp. viii, 253. Cloth $49.95, paper $18.95.

The twelve essays in this volume originated at a conference held in the spring of 2001, at a time when military and civilian deaths did not yet dominate headlines and haunt our national consciousness. Editors Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein began with a conviction that the ways early Americans thought about death reveal aspects of "national self-definition" (p. 1), and in the wake of American casualties on September 11, 2001, and in the Iraq War, their conviction seems well sustained. The essays yield a rich array of approaches to mortality that go well beyond the landmark works that inaugurated the field in the 1970s. Philippe Ariès, David E. Stannard, Maris Vinovskis, and Michel Vovelle gave us either studies of "attitudes"—very broad and monolithically portrayed, in the case of Ariès—or else detailed demographic and social-history approaches to funeral customs, testamentary practices, and, in the case of Vinovskis, the paradox of long-lived Puritans obsessing over imminent demise. These essays, by contrast, bear the stamp of the 1990s in their attentions to race, gender, memory, landscape, and the symbolic uses of death to configure power relations.

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