This rich collection of original essays illuminates the causes and consequences of the South's defining experiences with death.

Death and the American South: an introduction Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover; 1. Mutilated bodies, living specters: scalpings and beheadings in the early South Craig Thompson Friend; 2. The usable death: evangelicals, Anglicans, and the politics of dying in the late colonial low country Peter N. Moore; 3. When 'history becomes fable instead of fact': the deaths and resurrections of Virginia's leading revolutionaries Lorri Glover; 4. American mourning: catastrophe, public grief, and the making of civic identity in the early national South Jewel L. Spangler; 5. To claim one's own: death and the body in the daily politics of antebellum slavery Jamie Warren; 6. Nativists and strangers: yellow fever and immigrant mortality in antebellum Charleston, South Carolina Jeff Strickland; 7. 'Cumberer of the earth': suffering and suicide among the faithful in the Civil War South Diane Miller Sommerville; 8. The 'translation' of Lundy Harris: interpreting death out of the confusion of sexuality, violence, and religion in the New South Donald G. Mathews; 9. 'He's only away': condolence literature and the emergence of a modern South Kristine M. McCusker; 10. 'A monument to Judge Lynch': racial violence, symbolic death, and black resistance in Jim Crow Mississippi Jason Morgan Ward; 11. Reframing the Indian dead: removal-era Cherokee graves and the changing landscape of Southern memory Andrew Denson.