| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Mortal Remains: Death in Early America. Ed. by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. x, 253 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8122-3678-5. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8122-1823-X.)
For at least two decades, it has been a historiographical cliché that Americanists have lagged behind Europeanists in the quantity and quality of their scholarship on death. But that bit of conventional wisdom can no longer withstand close scrutiny. Along with other important recent books such as Gary Laderman, Rest in Peace (2003), and Stephen Prothero, Purified by Fire (2001), Mortal Remains demonstrates the increasing abundance and sophistication of scholarship on death in America.	1
The twelve essays in this collection are noteworthy for their topical and intellectual scope. Not content to limit their inquiries to burial and mourning practices, the authors use death to examine such subjects as the trope of the vanishing Indian, images of dismemberment in political satire, and the changing role of angels in popular religious culture. Moreover, by breaching the divide between literary scholars and historians, this volume moves in a direction that would benefit numerous fields outside death studies. The literary aspect of this collection goes beyond the fact that two of the twelve contributors teach in English departments; many of the historians (particularly Nancy Isenberg, Michael Meranze, and Thomas G. Connors) display sophisticated literary sensibilities. Death lends itself especially well to a mixed literary-historical approach: individuals experience death as both highly scripted and irreducibly real.	. . .

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