Search results for ""author michael kammen""

With "Digging Up the Dead", Pulitzer Prize - winning historian Michael Kammen reveals a treasure trove of fascinating, surprising, and occasionally gruesome stories of exhumation and reburial throughout American history. Taking us to the contested grave sites of such figures as Sitting Bull, John Paul Jones, Frank Lloyd Wright, Daniel Boone, Jefferson Davis, and even Abraham Lincoln, Kammen explores how complicated interactions of regional pride, shifting reputations, and evolving burial practices led to public and often emotional battles over the final resting places of famous figures. Grave-robbing, skull-fondling, cases of mistaken identity, and the financial lures of cemetery tourism all come into play as Kammen delves deeply into this little-known - yet surprisingly persistent - aspect of American history. Simultaneously insightful and interesting, masterly and macabre, "Digging Up the Dead" reminds us that the stories of American history don't always end when the key players pass on. Rather, the battle - over reputations, interpretations, and, last but far from least, possession of the remains themselves - is often just beginning.

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"History painting," for many people, conjures up Washington Crossing the Delaware and other paintings of heroic historical events. But history has made its way into considerably more American art than such obvious examples, in the view of Michael Kammen. In three thought-provoking and innovative essays, Kammen ranges from the Renaissance to the twentieth century, from central Europe to the western United States, and from elegant oil painting to folk sculpture to show the transformations of Old World icons of time into New World images of social memory and tradition.In the first essay, Kammen demonstrates how American artists and artisans modified European emblems of time in response to their New World setting. In the second essay concerning nineteenth-century landscape art, he explores how artists used space to represent the movement of American culture through time. In the final essay, he looks at two distinctively American motifs of collective memory and tradition—old houses and elm trees. Throughout this interdisciplinary study, Kammen draws his examples from well-known and lesser-known artists, as well as from diverse American writers. Over 100 black-and-white illustrations accompany the text.Of interest to all students of American culture, Meadows of Memory raises intriguing questions about the American paradox of desiring to conquer mutability while yearning for emblems of a (perhaps imagined?) past.

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