Introduction
This book examines the rituals of dying and the politics of death among the working class during the period 1865–1920. It considers how wageworkers and their families experienced death in the United States between the Civil War and the end of World War I by focusing on John Henry—one of the hundreds of thousands of workers who died in service to industrialization—and the lack of surviving accounts about what happened to his dead body. The book draws on case studies to investigate how workers used the rituals of death to interpret, accommodate, and resist their living and working conditions; the ways social class shaped Americans' attitudes toward death; and the social and cultural contexts that shaped interpretations of workers' deaths resulting from work accidents. The book shows how rituals of death reflected the ways that working communities articulated beliefs about family, community, and class and negotiated social relationships—how common people interpreted their roles in the industrial republic.