Ashley Towle is assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Southern Maine.

This well-researched book bridges the scholarship on the cultural history of death and historians' work on African Americans' experiences during emancipation and Reconstruction. Between epidemics in refugee camps and the one-fifth of Black soldiers who perished during the Civil War, as well as the racial violence that erupted across the South during Reconstruction, many Black southerners lost their lives. Ashley Towle explores how African American communities both made sense of these deaths and invoked the memory of the dead to sustain their fight for civil rights and racial justice... In both bringing the concept of mortuary politics to bear on Black southerners' experiences in the years after the Civil War and in tracing how communities made Black deaths matter, Towle makes a significant contribution. Scholars of Reconstruction and emancipation, as well as students and history professionals working with historic cemeteries, will find much of interest here.

• IntroductionChapter 1 “Let’s Go to Buryin’”: African American Civilian Funerals and Cemeteries in FreedomChapter 2 “To Repose with Their Comrades”: African Americans and the Creation of National CemeteriesChapter 3 “The Widows and Families of the Heroic Dead”: African American Kinship and Domestic EconomyChapter 4 “The Invisible Army”: African American Religious Life and DeathChapter 5 “We Are Killed All the Day Long”: Testifying and Writing About DeathConclusion “In the Cold Valley and Shadow of the South Land”BibliographyAbout the Author

Ashley Towle is assistant professor in the History Department at the University of Southern Maine.

This well-researched book bridges the scholarship on the cultural history of death and historians' work on African Americans' experiences during emancipation and Reconstruction. Between epidemics in refugee camps and the one-fifth of Black soldiers who perished during the Civil War, as well as the racial violence that erupted across the South during Reconstruction, many Black southerners lost their lives. Ashley Towle explores how African American communities both made sense of these deaths and invoked the memory of the dead to sustain their fight for civil rights and racial justice... In both bringing the concept of mortuary politics to bear on Black southerners' experiences in the years after the Civil War and in tracing how communities made Black deaths matter, Towle makes a significant contribution. Scholars of Reconstruction and emancipation, as well as students and history professionals working with historic cemeteries, will find much of interest here.

• IntroductionChapter 1 “Let’s Go to Buryin’”: African American Civilian Funerals and Cemeteries in FreedomChapter 2 “To Repose with Their Comrades”: African Americans and the Creation of National CemeteriesChapter 3 “The Widows and Families of the Heroic Dead”: African American Kinship and Domestic EconomyChapter 4 “The Invisible Army”: African American Religious Life and DeathChapter 5 “We Are Killed All the Day Long”: Testifying and Writing About DeathConclusion “In the Cold Valley and Shadow of the South Land”BibliographyAbout the Author