The essays in Grave History demonstrate that the communities that cemeteries border and the regions they share make cemeteries a significant place for understanding the social, economic, and political life of specific times and places. With this as its base of understanding, Grave History asks readers to consider what burial grounds, graveyards, mausoleums, and memorial parks in the South can tell them about the past and the present. What symbolic or literal, metaphysical or real, and even abstract or distinct imprints from southern culture--past and present--do these cemeteries carry? Grave markers are unique forms of material culture meant to communicate very directly to subsequent generations. Each contributor has included an epilogue at the end of their chapter entitled "Teaching the American South by Learning the Dead." These epilogues provide primary sources and other resources and activities to allow readers to interrogate the complicated history of southern cemeteries for themselves. "Teaching the American South by Learning the Dead" offers classroom lesson plans for both the teacher and the student, and for both the seasoned and the novice cemetery enthusiast. These activities encourage readers to examine cemeteries for their physical organization, iconography, sociodemographic landscape, and identity politics. While readers might not be able to visit each cemetery mentioned in Grave History, the epilogues offer an opportunity to do the work of a historian and apply the arguments made in each chapter to their own analysis of the history of southern cemeteries. One of the important aspects of these epilogues is that they can be applied to other cemeteries across the United States and perhaps beyond. We want readers who are not from the South to think about what the cemeteries around them can reveal about the past and the present. Thus we hope to spur discussion of the importance of using cemeteries as a lens to explore the past, make sense of the present, and shape the future.