《“In This City of the Dead”Charleston’s Magnolia Cemetery and Middle-Class Aspiration》

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作者
Anne Marie Martin
来源
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.47,Issue5,P.1050–1066
语言
英文
关键字
作者单位
1University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR, USA
摘要
Like many other cities in the antebellum United States, Charleston, South Carolina, faced the challenge of managing longstanding, overfilled, urban burial spaces in an area with a large population and high mortality rates. Although Charleston would seem to have been an ideal candidate for an early rural cemetery, Magnolia Cemetery was not opened outside the city until almost twenty years after Mount Auburn’s founding. In Charleston, the modernizing impulse illustrated by calls for cemetery reform came in to conflict with the city’s dominant upper class. The establishment of Magnolia Cemetery was undertaken by middle-class Charlestonians who hoped to use burial to create an alternative social hierarchy that existed parallel to Charleston’s rigid slaveholding aristocracy.