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Funerals USA offers funeral planning advice for a family’s executor in making many critical decisions. Features comparative pricing models for interment services in the United States.

…disposal of the dead falls rather into a class with fashions, than with either customs or folkways on the one hand, or institutions on the other … social practices of disposing of the dead are of a kind with fashions of dress, luxury and etiquette.

One of the interesting things about burial practices is that they provide many a clue to the customs and society of the living. The very word “antiquarian” conjures up the picture of a mild-eyed historian groping about amidst old tombstones, copying down epitaphs with their folksy inscriptions and irregular spelling, extrapolating from these a picture of the quaint people and homey ways of yore. There is unconscious wit: the widow’s epitaph to her husband, “Rest in peace - until we meet again.”

We are left to wonder if this is some ritual act of contemplation, a heartfelt belief that when we die we meet those that have gone before us, or comforting words left for those that remain.

For purposes of comparison they might recall the words of Andrew Marvell, a poet from an earlier culture, who thus addressed his coy mistress:

The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.

They might rashly conclude that twentieth-century America was a nation of abjectly imitative conformists, devoted to machine-made gadgetry and mass-produced art of a debased quality; that its dominant theology was a weird mixture of primitive superstitions, superficial attitudes towards death, overlaid with a distinct tendency towards necrophilism…

Where did our burial practices come from? There is little scholarship on the subject. Thousands of books have been written describing, cataloguing, theorizing about the funeral procedures of ancient and modern peoples from Aztecs to Zulus; but about contemporary American burial practices almost nothing has been written.

The official historians of American undertaking describe the origin of our burial practices as follows:

“As a result of a long slow development, with its roots deep in the history of Western civilization, it is the common American mind today that the dead merit professional funeral services from a lay occupational group. These services include embalming, the preparation of the body for final viewing, a waiting period between death and disposition, the use for everyone of a casket that is attractive and protects the remains, a dignified and ceremonious service with consideration for the feelings of the bereaved, and an expression of the individual and group beliefs. . . .” Elsewhere they assert:

“The roots of American funeral behavior extend back in a direct line several thousand years to early Judaeo-Christian beliefs as to the nature of God, man and the hereafter … Despite the antiquity of these roots their importance as regards the treatment of the dead in the world that commonly calls itself Christian today cannot be overemphasized.”

In two misinformation-packed paragraphs, we are assured not only that American funerals are based on hallowed custom and tradition, but that they conform to long-held religious doctrine. There is more than a hint of warning in these words for the would-be funeral reformer; he who would be bold enough to make light of or tamper with the fundamental beliefs and ancient traditions of a society in so sensitive an area as behavior towards its dead, had better think twice.

A “long, slow development with its roots deep in the history of Western civilization,” or a short, fast sprint with its roots deep in money-making? A brief look backward would seem to establish that there is no resemblance between the funeral practices of today and those of even fifty to one hundred years ago, and that there is nothing in the “history of Western civilization” to support the thesis of continuity and gradual development of funeral customs. On the contrary, the salient features of the contemporary American funeral (beautification of the corpse, metal casket and vault, banks of store-bought flowers, ubiquitous offices of the “funeral director”) are all of very recent vintage in this country, and each has been methodically designed and tailored to extract maximum profit for the trade.
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Throughout history, the ocean has played an integral role in shaping the identity of Atlantic Canadians. It was the mainstay of the first people on this land, the natives; it brought the first Viking explorers, as well as later adventurers, to our shores; it lured the first Western European settlers here with its rich bounty of fish. Even today, the people of this region use the ocean as a source of transportation, recreation, employment, and food; not to mention as a source of inspiration for our songs, stories, poems, paintings and carvings. If you go to any fishing village along our coastline you will see, hear and taste the impact this rich resource has on our lives. No other force has shaped this region’s culture and people as much as the ocean.

The oceans sector continues to be a great contributor to the economy of Atlantic Canada. Activities such as commercial fishing, oil and gas exploration, tourism, and shipping rely on the ocean directly or indirectly and contribute to our Gross Domestic Product. It is estimated that these activities and other ocean-related industries injected over 3.3 billion dollars into Atlantic Canada’s economy in 1996 alone!

This strong lure of the sea has lead Atlantic Canada to become a leader in oceanography, the study of the oceans. This website is designed to highlight some of the vast research that is taking place, and to introduce the careers of the people involved in this research.

• American Indians

  • Indian Legends

  • Indian Nations

Prior to the arrival of the white man, the Indians, “spartans of the plains and forests; lived happy, healthy, and adventurous lives. They were brave, stoic, simple and complex, warlike and peaceful, loyal, and self-sacrificing for family and friends. The code of the Great Confederation of the Iroquois, followed by the hundreds of their chiefs, was to be brave, truthful, patient, unselfish, chivalrous, generous to a fault, helpful to their people in every way without accepting anything in return, and to work united for peace and in all things, calling upon the Creator to help them in their undertakings.

American Indian storytellers and their tales date from the time that the Indian was able to communicate intelligibly and intelligently. Many of the “modern” retellings of these legends, myths, and folk tales date from 1600 to 1760, when they were collected by the Jesuits. Since the early seventeenth century, legends have also been gathered by English, French, Dutch, and Spanish explorers and travelers, and set down as told by native storytellers. The tales have not materially changed, in reliable retellings, up to the twentieth century. This is remarkable, since setting down legends accurately was often difficult, chiefly because reliable interpreters were scarce. The early chroniclers had to be wary of would-be interpreters who ignored objectivity and sometimes embellished the tales passed down by the ancient storytellers or tried to build into them some of their own personality or beliefs.

In translations made by white men who had insufficient knowledge of the Indian language, some legends lost authenticity, meaning, and Indian flavor. Fortunately, the majority of such misleading tales have been discredited through study and comparison with legends set down in the Annual Reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology and other anthropological and scientific sources.

An amusing instance of taking liberties with translation occurred when the editor of this volume set down the legend of “The First Blackfish” for his book, Talking Stick Tales. The old Tlingit chief relating the tale said that the hunter rode on a sea lion’s back. Having previously heard the legend from a well-known Haida storyteller, the author suggested that it was not a sea lion but a gull. The Tlingit reluctantly replied: “What you heard about sea gull may be right; but because you write story for white people, maybe they believe it more if you say hunter went on back of sea lion-he much stronger than sea gull:’

American folklorists are greatly indebted to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, a pioneer in the field, who collected many tales and legends during his thirty years’ stay with the Indians. His first book of Indian legends was published in 1839. Several of his best stories appear in this book. But it was probably Longfellow’s lengthy narrative poem (of rather un-Indian tempo), The Song of Hiawatha (1855), that first aroused public interest in the Indians of North America.

The authentic records of unlettered peoples are usually short-lived, reaching back only in the memories of their oldest men. Among the Indian tribes, traditions and folklore were handed down orally and entrusted to those who showed a special aptitude in remembering them. Regarded as tribal historians, these men in turn instructed the boys.

The Indians evinced little or no interest in recording unvarnished historical facts, hence they were often embellished by fantasy or embroidered with the supernatural, so that it was almost impossible to separate fancy from reality. The differences and distortions apparent in legend variants were often due to reinterpretations.

Many long, detailed, verbal accounts of legendary lore have been almost entirely lost because only certain chiefs, medicine men, and storytellers were privileged to recite and explain some classes of traditions, especially sacred ones. Tribal rites, customs, songs, and dances were often based on such legends and myths. Some folklore was preserved in the form of songs adapted for use on suitable occasions. The primary myths, regarded as having sacred association and significance, were highly respected and were usually told in hushed voices, after dark, by specially appointed story-tellers, many of whom embellished their tales with prayer, song, dance, and wonderful mimicry. Some legends are of the classical type and display real literary art in their composition.

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Her father, John, found them in the home of my father’s sister, Mary. Aunt Mary was a widow with many children, but a woman of unusual capacity and determination. Her eyes fell approvingly on Grandfather John, a frail, gentle man resembling pictures of Jesus Christ. John’s wife was still alive and, to judge by a faded tintype, very beautiful. But she died shortly after, following a long illness, and my grandfather married Aunt Mary. In the small, drab villages and isolated farmhouses of northern Missouri little rumors often grew to gargantuan proportions. The gossips specialized most of all in the gruesome and more than one farm woman was thereafter seen wagging her head and heard talking of the strange things that were supposed to have happened in my grandfather’s house - of evil widows … and poor ailing wives… and poison…

Finally Grandfather wasted away and died of tuberculosis. Mary cared for him with infinite tenderness, uttering never a harsh word at his endless exactions, warning her many children, and his, to behave as she did. There lingers in my memory a vision of this tall, strong woman, sitting or kneeling by his bedside, engaged in low conversation or silent waiting.

So, John had died, said the gossips, shaking their heads knowingly. What else could you expect, when, as everyone knew, he had spent his declining years walking the floor complaining that his first wife’s spirit haunted him? As he lay dying, rumor ran, he wanted to cleanse his soul of the sin of poisoning his first wife, but Mary had smothered his confession by placing her hand across his mouth! Anything could be expected of that big woman, who came from God only knew where and could do anything from curing diseases with herbs to managing a big farm and rearing more than a dozen children!

If Aunt Mary had lived in an earlier period, her abilities might have caused her to be burned as a witch. Instead, she was well over ninety before she laid down her corncob pipe for the last time. People said she sped around the country in a Ford until her dying day, her white hair flying, her pipe in her mouth. She was so tall that when she died a special coffin had to be built for her. I have not yet heard just how many men were needed to carry the coffin, but by the time I get around to investigating the story, I’m sure the number will be fabulous. I’ve heard it said by the gentle branch of our family that Mary is most certainly not taking any back seat in the Hereafter.

All my mother’s people died young - which, considering their goodness, was only natural, On the other hand, all my father’s people, save one uncle who turned Christian missionary, lived to a ripe old age. The two family strains, meeting in me, made my spirit a battlefield across which a civil war raged endlessly.

When I was very young, my father dragged us from northern Missouri to southern Colorado, where Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel & Iron Company owned everything but the air. My father went to this region to make his fortune, but fell victim to a system the fruits of which were poverty, disease and ignorance for the miners.

We lived a primitive life in the camps, but I now understand that our intellectual poverty was far worse than our physical condition. When I try to recollect the impact of so-called cultural influences, I can recall only Scotch and English folk-songs, cowboy songs, and such ballads as those in praise of Jesse James - all of them sung by my father. I do not remember hearing my mother sing; she was too unhappy.

Until I was fifteen years old I knew little of the world beyond that Rockefeller domain of southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. My father did unskilled labor and drank to forget his hopes, and my mother worked intermittently as a washwoman and a keeper of boarders. We Smedley children - there were five of us - somehow managed to get to the poor local primary schools. But I never finished grade school and never attended a high school. Most highschool graduates of today inspire no regret in me, but I have always believed that had I had some basic knowledge of science, mathematics, literature, and language, I would have been better equipped to meet life. I have long felt that the poverty and ignorance of my youth were the tribute which I, like millions of others, paid to “private interests.”

The schools my brothers and sisters and I attended were perhaps no more boring than most. However, my thinking was not to be disciplined, and not all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could teach me grammar or arithmetic. Even in later years my efforts to learn languages ended in dismal failure, although in the case of German I managed to absorb what I needed or whatever sounded beautiful or powerful. If I disliked a person, my mind closed and I could learn nothing from him. So I took from schools and from life what I found interesting, not what people thought good for me. But my mother and a red-haired woman schoolteacher in Tercio, a mining camp, must have regarded me with hope, for they kept urging me to get an education. Education seemed to consist in reading many books, but just which I did not know. For years I groped, reading anything between covers, often understanding hardly a sentence, but believing mystically that the key to knowledge lay buried in words. My reading covered everything from trashy romance to a ghastly book on school law and one called Behaviorist Psychology.

The nearest I ever came to the classics was a large volume of something called “poetry.” Because it was printed on very thin paper, it quite naturally hung from a string in a privy. A man by the name of Shakespeare seemed to have written it but I could make neither head nor tail of it. In later years I often read of men who received their first noble impulses from contacts with great minds; I was in my early twenties before I learned who Shakespeare was, and in my forties before I read his plays. In the mining camps he had made no impression whatsoever and I returned the volume of thin paper to its nail on the privy wall.

I disliked so many things in life and received so many humiliations from rich little girls that my teachers used to keep me after school and lecture me on the bourgeois virtues. It was in vain. I fought boys with jimson weeds and rocks, and nothing could make a little lady of me. When I was nine my mother put me out to work washing dishes and caring for squawling babies. I was later promoted to stripping tobacco leaves in a cigar store, but I dawdled so much over my work that I was fired. One employer told me that I was a bad worker because I read too many books. “Here’s your wages for the week, and you needn’t come back,” he said. He gave me two dollars and a half. For years after that I did all kinds of unskilled labor.

• Nova Scotia

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The first attempt at settlement of Markland – named Acadia by the French –was made by a native of France, Baron de Lery in the year 1518. he arrived too late in the season to construct houses for his people and so returned home leaving part of his livestock in Canso.

After de leery none came to colonize these lands until Jacques Cartier, the hardy St, Malo mariner, sailed with his men into the Gulf and up the River St. Lawrence to the point where Montreal now stands. Attracted by his findings of the wealth of the new world fisheries came a horde of English, French, Spanish and Portuguese fishermen, who plied their calling off the coast and dried their fish on the shores.

In 1598 a French nobleman, Marquis de la Roche, armed with a Royal commission, sailed with a party of fifty convicts for Acadia. He landed them on Sable Island and went in search of grounds suitable for a settlement, but was forced by adverse gales to return to France. Only twelve of the convicts remained alive when rescuers reached them seven tears later.

A few years later another nobleman of France, Pierre du Guast, Sieur de Monts, received from his monarch, Henry the Fourth, a patent constituting him Lieutenant- General of Acadia. He was also given a monopoly of the fur trade. De Mont set forth on march 7, 1604, with a party of 120 farmers in two ships to people the territory named in his grant, Acadia, or New France, which covered lands, now Nova Scotia, and also adjoining territory.

With de Monts sailed Samuel Champlain, an experienced navigator, and a Picardy nobleman, Baron de Poutrincourt. After sighting Cape La Have the party skirted the coast line, explored the Bay of Fundy and finally established the first settlement in Nova Scotia, on the shores of a beautiful harbour on the Annapolis Basin, which they christened Port Royal. That settlement was at Lower Granville, seven miles from the present Annapolis Royal.

Champlain at this time explored the coast of what is now New England and in 1606 a large number of artisans from France joined the colony. In that year also came Marc Lescarbot, law3yer and poet and man of affairs, who became the ablest historian of the French colonial transactions of that period. In the following winter Champlain instituted at Port Royal his famous “Order of the Good time”, of which many stories have come down to us.

The English meanwhile had obtained a foothold in Virginia and from thence in 1613 came an armed force under Samuel Argall, which utterly destroyed Port Royal as encroaching upon the territories of the English. From this historical inroad dates the long and bitter struggle lasting a century and a half for the possession of Acadia [Nova Scotia] – a conflict that was not ended until Wolfe’s victory at Quebec and the surrender of new France.

Great Britain’s first attempt at the settlement of what is now Nova Scotia was made in 1621 when, on the ground of prior discovery, King James the First of England and sixth of Scotland granted to Sir William Alexander, a Scottish gentleman of his court, the lands lying between New England and Newfoundland,’ to be holden of us from our kingdom of Scotland as a part thereof”.

It is therefore a fact worth noting that New Scotland sprang as it were, direct from the loins of old Scotland, Alexander resolved by the favour of the king to engage his countrymen in extending the glory of their native land by forming a New Scotland across the ocean. The name Nova Scotia used in the document conveying the grant was the suggestion of sir William, who said to the King.” My countrymen would never adventure to such an enterprise unless it was as there was a new France, a new Spain, a new England, that they might likewise have a new Scotland.’ In this document lies the origin of Nova Scotia as a Province.

Sir William Alexander dreamed of a feudal state, with himself as Lieutenant-Governor. In order that he might take possession of his lands after the feudal fashion he had Nova Scotia made a part of the County of Edinburgh. Therefore different parts of Nova Scotia were 3,000 miles apart at a time. Thereupon he entered upon the ownership of his barony with all the display of ceremonial of Edinburgh Castle.

An interesting outgrowth of that undertaking was the creation of a Scottish order of Knighthood, known as the Baronets of Nova Scotia which was bestowed upon each of the gentlemen who subscribed 3,000 marks toward the exploration and colonization of the new land. This order was conferred upon 140 persons. Each creation up to 1638 carried with it a barony of four by six miles in Nova Scotia. The order was not wholly bestowed upon court favourites. All parts of Scotland and Scottish life were respected in the roll of honour. Although the baronets raised a total of about 26,000 pounds the expeditions they sent out were not very successful, and finally in 1632 treacherous session of Nova Scotia to France by Charles the First brought the enterprise to an end.

Oliver Cromwell, the next ruler of England, recovered what Charles of England had basely surrendered and Acadia became once more Nova Scotia; but this position was changed again in 1667, when Charles the Second gave away what Cromwell had won, that is to say, “all the country called Acadia situated in America which the most Christian King had formerly enjoyed”.

Another war, however, soon came between England and France after the expulsion of James the Second, Port Royal was compelled to surrender to a force from Boston, and possession of Nova Scotia again changed hands. The country retreated to the French through a Treaty of King William the Third in 1697; but at the end of a further war, in 1713, the mainland of Nova Scotia passed into the possession of the British, a position which has never since changed. France retained her hold on Cape Breton Island until Louisburg was captured in 1758.

To reach these results many battles were fought and many interesting historical events happened in New Scotland, as for instance, the two sieges of Louisburg, and the famous expulsion of the Acadians, celebrated in Longfellow’s poem Evangeline.

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There are 9,999 rooms inside the palace. All the rooms have beautifully painted wood. Strangely, the inner sanctum rooms were forbidden to women, barring the Empress only on her wedding day. Although no longer occupied by the royalty (nevertheless, there is no royalty in modern Peoples republic of China), the Forbidden City remains a symbol of the country’s imperial past.

The UNESCO lists the Forbidden City for its huge collection of preserved ancient wooden structures - it became a World Heritage Site in 1987 as the ‘Imperial Palace of the Ming and Quing Dynasites.’

There are two major parts in the Forbidden City. The Outer Court and the Inner Court.

Outer Court - It has three halls that were used for Coronations, Investitures, Weddings and other ceremonial events. The incredible Hall of Supreme Harmony belongs to the Outer Court. The imperial library, archives, and the lantern storage area were also a part of the Outer Court.

Inner Court - northern, eastern and western parts of the palace form the Inner Court. It includes three other halls that were used more often, on a daily basis actually for administration and other purposes. The Palace of Heavenly Purity was a part of these courts. This is where the Emperor lived, accompanied by the immediate family, maidservants and eunuchs.

There are royal gardens all around the Forbidden City. Zhongnanhai is a building complex that has two lakes around it. Incidentally, it is now the Headquarters for the Communist Party of China. There is also the Beihai Park that is also at the center of a lake - it has now become a park. The Ming Emperor hanged himself when a rebel army attacked, and the place where it happened is Jingshan Park, which is also referred to as Jing Shan or Coal Hill.

When Yuan Dynasty ruled China, Forbidden City was a part of the bigger Imperial City. Yuan Dynasty was succeeded by the Ming Dynasty, and the first Hongwu Emperor went to Nanjing and made it the capital. By royal order, Mongol Palace was razed.

The Forbidden City has gates on each side. It is surrounded by walls that were made thick so that it could bear cannon attacks.

Most international tourists to China come to Beijing. If you are planning a trip to Beijing, do not miss out on the Forbidden City. There is much more to China than just the Chinese wall.