Includes bibliographical references (pages 233-255).

Prologue -- Cannibals, a coffin, and a captain's staff: colonial Jamestown's original graves reveal America's distinctly uncivilized beginnings -- Pilgrim's progress?: to trace America's long, ongoing history of desecrating the Native dead, start at Plymouth Rock -- ...Or give me death: Jewish cemeteries are America's first and most enduring public expressions of religious liberty, which makes them targets for intolerance -- Where the bodies are buried: southern plantation owners concealed the evidence of their moral crimes by hiding the bones of the enslaved -- Out of the churchyard, into the woods: rural-style cemeteries transformed America's landscape, turning burial grounds into tree-filled destinations -- Underground art: the Brooklyn cemetery that turned New York into America's cultural capital -- Death comes equally to us all: racial segregation in American cemeteries is still very much alive -- The tonic of wildness: how Emerson and Thoreau turned a new cemetery into the country's first conservation project -- A cemetery by any other name: Central Park, built on burial grounds, has become Manhattan's most active repository for human remains -- Four score and seventy-nine years ago: the Civil War opened the gates to the capitalism of corpses, and death in America has never been the same -- Sweet and fitting to die for one's country: how Arlington National Cemetery's success as a monument to war made American's eager to fill it -- Keeping up with the corpses: the way cemeteries set the mold for America's suburban subdivisions -- Lasting impressions: tombstones in old boot hill graveyards keep alive the lost story of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century American west -- The Disneyland of graveyards: how a Los Angeles cemetery corporatized mourning in America -- We didn't start the fire: cremation now outnumbers burials in America and has surprisingly led some dying cemeteries to rise from the ashes -- Leveraging buried assets: facing an existential thread from Digital Immortality, cemeteries are staging a gritty fight for survival -- Back to nature: green cemeteries return America's burial practices to the country's earliest days -- Epilogue.