June Hadden Hobbs, Professor of English at Gardner-Webb University, will present a historical survey of cemetery trends in the United States during Coffee and Conversation sponsored by Journey - Partnership for End of Life Issues. Thursday, May 23, at Noon at the Neal Senior Center in Shelby. The event is free and open to the public. The lecture will begin in colonial New England with gravestones from the Boston area. Hobbs will also explore the lasting influence of the mid-nineteenth-century Rural/Garden Cemetery movement, and end with more contemporary practices, including those in local cemeteries.  The presentation will focus on the importance of selective memory in preserving cultural values and on the way memory shapes both community and individual identity.
Hobbs became interested in cemeteries and tombstones while writing a book on American women’s hymns. During a tour of Shelby’s Sunset Cemetery, she found the slightly altered chorus of Fanny Crosby’s “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” (1859) on a beautiful marble monument and decided it to use a picture of it in her book to illustrate the cultural importance of hymns in memorization. Since then, she has published a number of articles on tombstones and cemeteries and became editor of Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies. She is also the author of an illustrated essay on the Victorian Cemetery that is part of a website published recently in conjunction with an exhibit of Alexander Gardner’s Civil War photographs at Antietam Battlefield (http://waronourdoorsteps.net).
These quarterly sessions sponsored by Journey are free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.  For more information please contact Len Byers at 980-487-3855.