Communist Plot

I'm flying solo with this episode about three area cemeteries I've been to and a few interesting historical figures buried in each one! The three cemeteries are Madronia Cemetery (I keep saying "Madrona" in the episode), Santa Clara Mission Cemetery, and Oak Hill Memorial Park. Here’s the link to the gofundme I’m running for Elizabeth. Some further reading: Pushing Up Daisies: Why Grave Garde...

In this episode we discuss the need for alternative burial options and take a look at a few green burial options including human composting, aquamation, and natural burial. The sound quality on this one is not fantastic and we go majorly off topic in the last 20 minutes, so there’s a lot to look forward to in this episode! Articles mentioned/further reading: COVID-19 is overcrowding cemeteries and...

Part II of our exploration of goth origins gets into the history of the term "goth" and brings us up through the ages to the birth of the contemporary goth subculture.  Elizabeth would like to direct you to The Ghoul Guides for more in depth goth history and information. If you aren't following us on Instagram yet please do! I'm going to be posting some pics to go along with our episodes and...

To start off our new season we're talking about our own goth origin stories. There is a lot of death talk in this one (my dad passed away earlier this year and we talk about that a bit), though nothing graphic, but skip if you need to.  I foolishly thought this wasn't going to be a two parter but Elizabeth called it. Next week's part II will be about the goth subculture's origins.

Get hyped! A new season of Communist Plot is coming soon! I'll have a new episode edited and coming at your ears this Wednesday (if I remember how to edit audio files)! 

This episode has everything: An airfield, a distant jamboree, more crunchy leaf ASMR, goths audibly eating French fries (sorry about that one). We went to White County in Tennessee to find an assortment of comb style graves and found a few other interesting things along the way! Most of my research was pulled from Richard Finch's The Tennessee Comb Grave Tradition . As always, we'll be posting pic...

We visited three cemeteries in Columbia, two of which were the focus of a relatively recent MTSU Center for Historic Preservation project. Rosemount has served Columbia's Black community since 1873, Rose Hill is its neighbor and was originally established as a segregated whites-only cemetery. Together these two cemeteries tell the full story of Columbia's past--from Emancipation through Jim Crow t...

Elizabeth found a goofy local ghost story/urban legend that led us to finding pieces of important local history that have been neglected. Links: Find a grave for Old Jefferson Old Jefferson directions plus links for getting to the Trail of Tears segment of the trail (these haven't been updated in a while and were a little difficult to follow. The best course of action was using this map and cross...

We went up to Kentucky to see some of Mammoth Cave National Park's beautiful cemeteries! This episode has everything: poor planning, a story about the Kentucky Cave Wars, a river ferry, us still not knowing how to record a podcast. It's a good time! I used this really neat interactive map to plan our trip. It has locations and descriptions of all the identified cemeteries in Mammoth Cave National...

We're back! Kicking off our 2021 season with a discussion of the 1950 article "Status After Death" by William M. Kephart which takes a look at class distinctions within funerary proceedings and customs in Philadelphia. We follow that up with a more recent article that's a good companion piece, "The Difficult Business of Dying" by Jess Bergman , which talks about the modern Funeral Industrial Compl...

A little promo to let y'all know we're coming back for October 2021! If you want to check out our cemetery reviews from last year they're up on my instagram here (maybe this year I'll move them over to an actual account for the show)

Going over our faves from our 2020 Middle TN Cemetery Reviews (which can be seen on my Instagram account). Notes: [The two cemetery guide websites we talk about are the Davidson County Cemetery Survey Project and the Rutherford County Cemetery Survey Project]

We talk to our friend Sarah about visiting Père-Lachaise, walk around in crunchy leaves, and discover that the pentagrams we were seeing on tombstones are actually less metal than we thought. Notes: [I definitely said that Père-Lachaise was established in 1806 but it actually opened in 1804.]

Using Thomas W. Laqueur's article "The Deep Time of the Dead" as a frame work, we talk about why cemeteries exist and why we like hanging out in them. Notes: [TW: brief mention of suicide around 24 minute mark] [The book I couldn't remember the name of is The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains by Thomas W. Laqueur]

Answering the burning questions: What is this? What will y'all be talking about? Is this a podcast? Notes: [Elizabeth would like to note that in her egalitarian take on modern cemeteries when she said that race was a bit more of a "sticky subject" specifically in the context of cemeteries, she was trying to not over simplify and misrepresent the fact that race still plays a role after death, espec...