BackStory (website, iTunes) is a public radio show and podcast about US history that keeps getting better and better. The latest episode, Grave Subjects: A History of Death and Mourning (website, iTunes) is a riveting discussion of death and dying in American culture, posted online last week just in time for Memorial Day.
The program’ s hosts are three history professors, Ed Ayers, Peter Onuf and Brian Balogh, who specialize in different eras of US history. In an earlier post I complained about their lame attempts at humor, but either the jokes have gotten better or I have learned to ignore them and concentrate on on their insightful comments about the ways America’s past can help illuminate the present.
Grave Subjects opens with an interview with a bereaved military mom who turned into an antiwar activist when the Army refused to give her photos of her son’s flag-draped coffin arriving at Dover Air Force Base.
Another highlight of the show is an interview with Harvard historian Drew Gilpin Faust, author of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Faust talks about 19th century concept of “the good death.” Americans believed that the moment of death provided a glimpse of the afterlife. Thus a “good death,” witnessed by friends and family predicted life everlasting. Faust describes how doctors and nurses in military hospitals would send letters to bereaved relatives, describing their loved ones’ last moments, so that families could participate in the moment of death from afar.
The podcast closes with a discussion how the advent of chemical preservatives and professional morticians in the late 19th century took care of the corpse out of the home and into the “funeral home.”
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Filed under: Books, History, Idea of the week | Tagged: BackStory, Brian Balogh, death, Drew Gilpin Faust, Ed Ayers, Memorial Day, Peter Onuf, US Civil War
