Cemeteries reflect society's interpretation of the continuing personhood of the dead. Colonial America's small rural family graveyards and churchyard burial grounds were an integral part of the community of the living, crowded with tombstones bearing the picturesque iconography of winged skulls, hourglasses, and soul-effigies, and inscriptions ranging from the taciturn to the talkative—some with scant facts of name, age, and date of death, others offering thumbnail biographies, unusual circumstances of decease ("They froze to death returning from a visit"), homilies in verse ("As I am now, so you shall be, /Remember death and follow me"), and even the occasional dry one-liner ("I expected this, but not so soon").

In the nineteenth century, alarmed by public health problems associated with increasing industrial urbanization, the rising medical profession pressed for new cemeteries on the outskirts of towns, where the buried bodies could not pollute nearby wells and where any...