Winner of the Historic Preservation Book Award and of an ASLA Merit Award, this new edition of Silent City on a Hill has been completely redesigned in a larger format, with new photographs and a new epilogue that carries the story forward into the twentieth century.
Linden's award-winning study is an insightful inquiry into the intellectual and cultural origins of Mount Auburn Cemetery, the first landscape in the United States to be designed in the picturesque style. Inspired by developments in England and France, and founded in 1831, Mount Auburn became the prototype for the "rural cemetery" movement and was an important precursor of many of America's public parks, beginning with New York City's Central Park.
"Perhaps the greatest virtue of this book is its comprehensiveness.... In illuminating the furthest reaches of Mount Auburn's meaning, the author also sheds light on many other aspects of nineteenth-century American culture.... Each of the eleven chapters--especially the seven or eight that separate out for consideration specific strands of intellectual and aesthetic influence, such as that of the English garden, the French 'cult of ancestors,' or the American sensibility to melancholy--could stand on its own as an interesting study." -New England Quarterly