What Remains
Infirmary Burials, Memory, and Community in the Rubber City
Published on 30. September 2025
Book
Paperback/Softback
314 pages
978-1-62922-294-3 (ISBN)
Description
What Remains presents a grassy field with a complicated and fraught history. What is now a suburban park where people play soccer and flag football in the City of Akron, Ohio, was once a Progressive-era county infirmary's burial ground for people who were poor, infirm, troubled, immigrant, injured, alcoholic, elderly, or otherwise deemed "unemployable" during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through community-engaged scholarship, this book uses legal, historical, archaeological, and anthropological lenses to consider what is above and below the grass. What Remains is about memories and stories; how at times we collectively remember, forget, or even invent new pasts through the process of tracing and uncovering our own histories. It is about what is worth remembering, what is better left forgotten, and who gets to decide.
More details
Series
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 226 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 23 mm
Weight
522 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-62922-294-3 (9781629222943)
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Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Carolyn Behrman has worked in community-based and community-engaged research in Akron for more than twenty years. The work she and her students have done include documenting and addressing food security for elementary school students, analyzing health concerns with resettling refugees, supporting leadership development in the Karen Community of Akron, and addressing social and environmental justice issues with Neighborhood Network and the Families Against City Transfer Stations (FACTS) group. She is a professor emerita of anthropology and former codirector of the EXL Center at the University of Akron. Timothy Matney is a professor of archaeology at the University of Akron. He has conducted fieldwork in the United States, Europe, and Asia, including over thirty seasons of work in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. In addition to archaeology, he has taught applied geophysical survey at the University of Akron since 1998. His previous book, Ziyaret Tepe: Exploring the Anatolian Frontier of the Assyrian Empire (2017, Cornucopia Press), coauthored with three collaborators, was winner of the Archaeological Institute of America's national 2019 Felicia A. Holton Book Award for a popular presentation of archaeology.