Reburials of famous people might seem morbid, but the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Michael Kammen says the topic is often funny and frequently peculiar.
Take Daniel Boone, buried in a Missouri graveyard shortly after his death in 1820. Kentucky wanted Boone back, despite Missouri’s opposition and Boone’s having sworn never to set foot in Kentucky again after he left in about 1790. So Kentucky hired three men to excavate what were believed to be Boone’s remains. They were hauled to Frankfort, Ky., where they remain today.
Mr. Kammen’s book, Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press. Mr. Kammen, a professor emeritus of history at Cornell University, said that analyzing reburials helps us see important cultural trends, including the reputations of historical figures.
One notable example is Jefferson Davis, who rose to prominence beginning in the 1840s and became president of the Confederacy during the Civil War. Davis was vilified in the South immediately after the war’s end, when he fled Richmond, purportedly in women’s clothing.
But he became popular during a wave of pro-Confederacy sentiment in the South around the time of his death, in 1889. Although Davis was buried where he died, in New Orleans, several states fought heatedly for the right to rebury him. Virginia won, and Davis was buried in Richmond four years later.
“For the most part reputations don’t remain constant,” Mr. Kammen said in an interview with The Chronicle. “They rise and fall; they ebb and flow, and for the most part the story of reburials opens up that whole subject in a way that usually only gets opened up on an individual basis.”
The idea for the book came to Mr. Kammen over the course of the last few decades as his research kept turning up mentions of reburials. “I began to think hard about it, and it added up to more than a miscellaneous lot of bizarre and lurid, but morbid and intensely interesting, anecdotes,” he said.
Working on the book hasn’t given Mr. Kammen any new ideas on what he’d like done after he dies: He has long had plans for organ donation and cremation. But it has given him the opportunity to laugh.
“This was a hilarious project,” Mr. Kammen said. “I chuckled my way through.”
