Clause of Death: The Social Lives of U.S. Obituaries, 1918-2023

Abstract

United States newspapers have published obituaries for more than two hundred years. Obituaries provide written notice of individual deaths and summaries of the lives of the deceased. However, they do more than document the past; obituaries also perform social action in the present. They are authored, reflecting the grief and motivations of survivors. They circulate in ways that make visible certain lives while obscuring others, constrained by the media and technology through which they are distributed, just as they imprint upon these forms. Finally, they are consumed by survivors and strangers alike, upon whom they make demands. While they are intimately individual and local, they can also build coalitions across difference just as they continue to be a primary means of the gatekeeping and segregation of grief by race, class, gender, sexuality, and geography. They can make visible and challenge the stigma of death and dying just as they can obscure many of the dead. This holds particularly true for moments of epidemic and outbreak, which can reveal more about structural forces and social fault lines, just as they often generate an uptick in obituaries themselves. This dissertation uses obituaries as a sampling device to examine grief, bereavement, and death reporting across four causes of death between the early twentieth to twenty-first centuries: 1918 influenza, HIV/AIDS, drug overdose, and COVID-19. In doing so, I examine what it means to mourn, remember, and forget in moments of profound individual and collective loss.