You don't have to be a ghoul to enjoy graveyards. Visiting the final resting places of well-known personalities and historical figures is as much a celebration of lives fascinatingly (or self- destructively) led as it is an illuminating look into the past. Authors Patricia and Jonathan Brooks unearth nearly a thousand intriguing characters whose legacies live on beyond the grave. Inside this volume you'll find detailed obituaries and sepulchral photographs, as well as useful data on cemetery locations and visiting hours; availability of maps, tours, walks, and special events; and original homesteads and museums - plus tasty lunch spots! - located nearby.

A hauntingly beautiful travel guide to the world's most visited cemeteries, told through spectacular photography andtheir unique histories and residents. More than 3.5 million tourists flock to Paris's Pè Lachaise cemetery each year.They are lured there, and to many cemeteries around the world, by a combination of natural beauty, ornate tombstones and crypts, notable residents, vivid history, and even wildlife. Many also visit Mount Koya cemetery in Japan, where 10,000 lanterns illuminate the forest setting, or graveside in Oaxaca, Mexico to witness Day of the Dead fiestas. Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery has gorgeous night tours of the Southern Gothic tombstones under moss-covered trees that is one of the most popular draws of the city. 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die features these unforgettable cemeteries, along with 196 more, seen in more than 300 photographs. In this bucket list of travel musts, author Loren Rhoads, who hosts the popular Cemetery Travel blog, details the history and features that make each destination unique. Throughout will be profiles of famous people buried there, striking memorials by noted artists, and unusual elements, such as the hand carved wood grave markers in the Merry Cemetery in Romania.

From the days of ancient Greece, people have hurried their steps as they passed by—or, Heaven forbid, walked through—a cemetery after dark. Indeed, over the centuries we’ve developed many a superstition to protect ourselves from restless graveyard ghosts. Haunted Cemeteries exhumes more than two dozen stories of some of the most actively haunted graveyards both in this nation and abroad, including:DIV • The Greenwood Hauntings: Greenwood Cemetery in Decatur, Illinois, is one of the most ghoulish graveyards in America’s Heartland, sporting at least five individual entities, a gaggle of ghost lights, and a whole trainload of Civil War dead./divDIV • Pretty in Pink: The ethereal ghost of the Pink Lady floats over the graves of the Yorba Cemetery in Yorba Linda, California—on June 15 of even-numbered years, that is./div • The Queen of Voodoo: The restless spirit of Marie Laveau, the nineteenth-century Queen of Voodoo, is said to appear in New Orleans’s St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in the form of a gigantic black crow or a phantom black hellhound—when she’s not walking through the French Quarter.

Unearth the Mysteries of Those Who Lie Beneath the Oldest Graveyards in the Golden State In each of California’s 58 counties there are hundreds (and hundreds) of cemeteries, burial sites, and abandoned graveyards, some tucked away behind storefronts or under paved streets. “Burying grounds” are found in neighborhoods, pastures, fields, downtowns, backyards, or deep in the woods. In What Lies Beneath: California Pioneer Cemeteries and Graveyards, author Gail L. Jenner exhumes the stories of these pioneers buried beneath the soil, pavement, and rocks, or under the waters of this state. This guide also provides descriptions of headstone features and symbols, and demystifies the burial traditions used by the Native Americans, Spanish, Chinese immigrants, and early California pioneers and settlers.

A 2017 Choice Outstanding Academic Title The mythic American West, with its perilous frontiers, big skies, and vast resources, is frequently perceived as unchanging and timeless. The work of many western-based historical archaeologists over the past decade, however, has revealed narratives that often sharply challenge that timelessness. Historical Archaeology Through a Western Lens reveals an archaeological past that is distinct to the region—but not in ways that popular imagination might suggest. Instead, this volume highlights a western past characterized by rapid and ever-changing interactions between diverse groups of people across a wide range of environmental and economic situations. The dynamic and unpredictable lives of western communities have prompted a constant challenging and reimagining of both individual identities and collective understandings of their position within a broader national experience. Indeed, the archaeological West is one clearly characterized by mobility rather than stasis. The archaeologies presented in this volume explore the impact of that pervasive human mobility on the West—a world of transience, impermanence, seasonal migration, and accelerated trade and technology at scales ranging from the local to the global. By documenting the challenges of both local community-building and global networking, they provide an archaeology of the West that is ultimately from the West.

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, The Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize for the History of Technology “A panoramic vision of cultural change” —The New York Times Through the story of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge, the author of Orwell's Roses explores what it was about California in the late 19th-century that enabled it to become such a center of technological and cultural innovation The world as we know it today began in California in the late 1800s, and Eadweard Muybridge had a lot to do with it. This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.