On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery - Softcover

Poole, Robert M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802715494 ISBN 13: 9780802715494

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2010

Synopsis

Created at the end of the Civil War, Arlington National Cemetery has become a part of the landscape as fixed in the national imagination as the White House or the Capitol building. The mansion at Arlington's heart, and the rolling hills on which it sits, had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee before he joined the Confederacy; strategic to the defense of Washington, Arlington became a Union encampment, a haven for freedmen, and a pauper's cemetery for soldiers dying in the nation's bloodiest conflict.

With the passage of time, new layers of meaning were added to Arlington, which would become our nation's most honored shrine. More than three hundred thousand rest in Arlington's 624 acres, representing every war the nation ever fought. Each tombstone tells a story, from the Tomb of the Unknowns, so carefully tended today, to the eternal flame at John F. Kennedy's grave to the final resting places of ordinary citizen-warriors sleeping among Arlington's rolling green hills. Their stories, and the cemetery's time-honored rituals-the horse-drawn caissons, the rifle salutes, the sounding of Taps-still speak to us all.

About this title

About the Author:

Robert M. Poole is an editor and writer whose assignments for Smithsonian and National Geographic have taken him around the world. He is the author of Explorers House:National Georgraphic and the World It Made, and is a contributing editor at Smithsonian. Poole has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Preservation.

From AudioFile:

Author and narrator Robert Poole could be mistaken for a funeral director--he's a man with the appropriate words to discuss a sensitive subject. In his taciturn manner he tells of Arlington Cemetery's inception during the Civil War. Pilfering the land from the estate of Confederate General Robert E. Lee caused the Union Army no embarrassment. Poole chronicles the evolution of the graveyard in sequence with the conflicts that sent men and women to fill its fields. The services for President Kennedy in 1963 brought such attention to the grounds that many Americans began to aspire to be interred there someday. Other voices from Arlington's history punctuate the writer's narrative with their personal experiences. The production ends with the 24 most moving bugle notes ever written, "Taps." J.A.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0802715494
• ISBN 13: 9780802715494
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368