Robert M. Poole

On Hallowed Ground (eBook, ePUB)

The Story of Arlington National Cemetery

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

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.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. November 2009
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780802719782
• Artikelnr.: 54931088

Autorenporträt

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.