[PDF] Historical Tours Arlington National Cemetery eBook
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These history travel guides provide an introduction discussing the history and preservation of the present-day site and facilities and include a detailed, walking tour interspersed with first-hand accounts about the cemetery and events that have taken place there. A timeline runs through the walking tour giving descriptions of key personalities who conceived, planned and designed the area with brief and colorful biographies. Also included is information that visitors to the site need to know about planning a trip there, including where to stay, eat, and what to see nearby.
Walk through America’s most sacred ground and come to know the people and events that have shaped history Known for its more than 300,000 graves and for iconic monuments including the John F. Kennedy gravesite and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington National Cemetery is one of America’s most important historical landmarks. This book brings you face-to-face as never before with the people and events that have shaped its history. It features: - An introduction that sets Arlington National Cemetery in historical context - A timeline that adds further texture to the history described - A historical tour of key graves, including concise biographies of those who rest there - Nearby places to stay, eat, and visit - Archival and color photos throughout - Two PopOut maps—an archival map, and another showing the cemetery today About the Timeline series These one-of-a-kind books bring you face to face with the people and events that have shaped American history and who have left their mark on some of the nation’s most important historical landmarks and locations.
Span>Known for its more than 300,000 graves and for iconic monuments including the John F. Kennedy gravesite and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington National Cemetery is one of America's most important historical landmarks. This book brings you face-to-face as never before with the people and events that have shaped its history./span
Pulitzer Prize Finalist Winner of the John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize Winner of the Sharon Harris Book Award Finalist, Jefferson Davis Award of the American Civil War Museum Arlington National Cemetery is one of America’s most sacred shrines, a destination for millions who tour its grounds to honor the men and women of the armed forces who serve and sacrifice. It commemorates their heroism, yet it has always been a place of struggle over the meaning of honor and love of country. Once a showcase plantation, Arlington was transformed by the Civil War, first into a settlement for the once enslaved, and then into a memorial for Union dead. Later wars broadened its significance, as did the creation of its iconic monument to universal military sacrifice: the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. As Arlington took its place at the center of the American story, inclusion within its gates became a prerequisite for claims to national belonging. This deeply moving book reminds us that many brave patriots who fought for America abroad struggled to be recognized at home, and that remembering the past and reckoning with it do not always go hand in hand. “Perhaps it is cliché to observe that in the cities of the dead we find meaning for the living. But, as McElya has so gracefully shown, such a cliché is certainly fitting of Arlington.” —American Historical Review “A wonderful history of Arlington National Cemetery, detailing the political and emotional background to this high-profile burial ground.” —Choice
*Includes pictures *Explains the transformation of Arlington from a private estate to a military cemetery *Includes contemporary accounts describing Arlington and its history *Includes a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents "Looking across this field, we see the scale of heroism and sacrifice. All who are buried here understood their duty. All stood to protect America. And all carried with them memories of a family that they hoped to keep safe by their sacrifice." - President George W. Bush, 2005 Cemeteries are by their very nature tragic places, as they would never exist were it not for the inevitably cold hand of death that will certainly take out each person eventually. Given that fact, each bears its own unique history, whether it be the Valley of the Kings in Egypt or a small family plot in rural Georgia. Naturally, Arlington National Cemetery, sitting as it does on the very edge of the nation's capital upon a hill across the Potomac River, bears its own tragic aura, but it's certainly ironic that it was never intended to be a cemetery at all. Indeed, the very land was not meant to house the nation's dead but to support the family of the nation's father, George Washington himself. How Arlington went within just a few tragic months from stately mansion to solemn sepulcher is one of the most unusual stories in American history, but in many ways it is also one of the most fitting. As author Karl Decker observed in 1892, "It stands as a connecting link between the historic time of struggle, in which the Government was first established, and the later and equally important years of strife that saw the principles for which the colonists fought once more triumphant, and the fabric of Constitutional Government more firmly based upon a federation of loyal States. With every important epoch in the history of the country Arlington has had its connection. It brings forth recollections of Washington as vividly as phantoms of the past century." Nothing could emphasize how divisive the Civil War was than the fate of Arlington, which was the place Confederate general Robert E. Lee called home. By marrying into the Custis family, Lee merged his family with relatives of Washington, but during the war, the fact that the Confederacy's most famous general had a house overlooking the Union capital bedeviled many, especially politicians. When the war's ghastly carnage filled up cemeteries around Washington, U.S. Army Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs ultimately proposed using Arlington as a cemetery, both for its location and for its connection with Lee, and Union soldiers were being buried near Lee's estate nearly a year before the war ended. Although the government would negotiate with Lee's family over the property after the war, from that point forward the cemetery expanded, and in addition to becoming the resting place for veterans, memorials and monuments of all kinds are scattered across the grounds. While the Lee house is still a tourist attraction, the grave site of slain president John F. Kennedy is on the grounds, as is a monument to the USS Maine and similar other tragedies. Arlington National Cemetery: The History of America's Most Famous Military Cemetery traces the history and legacy of the national park. Along with pictures of important people, places, and events, you will learn about the history of Arlington Cemetery like never before, in no time at all.
Bittersweet, breathtaking, and deeply respectful, this commemorative book of Arlington National Cemetery traces the ceremonies and services that honor individual men and women who served the country. 220 photos.
Mrs. Lee’s Rose Garden is an intimate retelling of Arlington National Cemetery’s tragic beginnings, and sheds new light on this profound chapter in American history. Mrs. Lee’s Rose Garden is the intensely personal story of Arlington National Cemetery’s earliest history as seen through the lives of three people during the outbreak of the Civil War: Mary Ann Randolph Custis Lee, Robert E. Lee, and Montgomery C. Meigs. With all the majesty and pathos of a Greek tragedy, this story unfolds as the war's inevitable spiral of betrayal, tragedy, loss, and death begins, ultimately transforming the nation’s most famous country estate into its most sacred ground. In the years before the war, the Arlington estate sat like an American Acropolis towering above Washington. Mary Custis Lee was known as the Rose of Arlington, a brash, young, willful, and charming young woman, indulged by her famous father, George Washington Parke Custis, the grandson of George Washington. Artistic, well read, and highly intelligent, she was an avid gardener who spent as much time as possible tending the numerous flowerbeds of the Arlington Mansion, along with her mother and her three daughters. Handsome and dashing, Robert E. Lee was easily the most promising soldier of his generation. But long before he was a field commander he was also a great success in the Army Corps of Engineers, having worked on major projects around the U.S. His friend, Montgomery C. Meigs, who had served under Robert, was a scion of Philadelphia society, and rose to become the engineer responsible for helping to complete the capital, and one of the most accomplished builders of his generation. When the time for war arose, Lee refused the opportunity to head the Union Army. He could not draw his sword against his own state, his own people, and instead accepted a commission in the Confederate Army, pitting himself against many of his old comrades. Thus began a series of events that would ultimately pit these three against each other.
Author : Robert M. Poole Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA Page : 369 pages File Size : 41,23 MB Release : 2010-11-08 Category : History ISBN : 0802715494
Documents the founding of the monument cemetery on the former family plantation of Robert E. Lee, revealing how the site once intended for the burials of indigent soldiers became a national resting place of honor throughout the subsequent century.