On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

by Robert M. Poole
On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

On Hallowed Ground: The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

by Robert M. Poole

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Overview

On Hallowed Ground opens with the long-delayed funeral of four servicemen, brought home for final honors at Arlington National Cemetery almost forty years after they disappeared in Vietnam. To understand how this tradition of extraordinary care for our war dead began, Robert Poole traces the founding of Arlington Cemetery on what had been the family plantation of Robert E. Lee. After resigning his commission in the U.S. Army, Lee left Arlington to command the Army of Northern Virginia. Arlington, strategic to the defense of Washington, D.C., became a U.S. Army headquarters and a cemetery for indigent Civil War soldiers before Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton made it the new national cemetery.
Initially, there was no honor attached to being buried at Arlington; this began to change after the war, as the Union gathered thousands of hastily-buried casualties from nearby battlefields and reinterred them at Arlington, where they received the honors of a grateful nation. But the rites, rituals, and reverence associated with Arlington evolved over the next hundred years, paid through the blood of those who fought in the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Cold War, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and Iraq and Afghanistan.
Robert Poole paints an intimate, behind-the-scenes picture of the history and day-to-day operations of Arlington National Cemetery.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780802719782
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date: 11/11/2009
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 368
Sales rank: 552,668
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Robert M. Poole is former executive editor of National Geographic and author of Explorers House, which was a holiday pick for Barnes&Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" series in 2004. He is a contributing editor at Smithsonian and a contract writer for National Geographic. Poole has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Preservation.
Robert M. Poole is former executive editor of National Geographic and author of Explorers House, which was a holiday pick for Barnes&Noble's "Discover Great New Writers" series in 2004. He is a contributing editor at Smithsonian and a contract writer for National Geographic. Poole has been published in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Preservation.

Robert M. Poole is a writer and editor whose work for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other magazines has taken him around the world. His last book, On Hallowed Ground, earned wide critical acclaim and was one of the Washington Post's Best Books of 2009. Poole, former executive editor of National Geographic, lives in Vermont.

Table of Contents

Prologue 1

Part I Disunion

1 Leaving Arlington 9

2 Occupation 22

3 "Vast Army of the Wounded" 37

4 First Burials 58

5 A Question of Ownership 76

Part II Reunion

6 "A Splendid Little War" 105

7 L'Enfant's Grand View 119

8 Known but to God 133

9 A Time to Build Up 160

10 "We Are All in It-All the Way" 176

11 The Nastiest Little War 194

Part III The Nation's Cemetery

12 "I Could Stay Here Forever" 209

13 The Last Unknown 230

14 War Comes to Arlington 251

15 Taps 263

Epilogue 269

Benediction 271

Acknowledgments 273

Appendix I Arlington Chronology 277

Appendix II Regulations for Burial 287

Notes and Sources 289

Index 343

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