Book description
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.
A plausible case for nepotism. He shows how five generations of a
public-spirited family...converted a boring academic journal into an
internationally loved magazine.
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.
