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The Ming Tombs, or the Thirteen Tombs as they are called in Chinese, lie about 50 kilometers to the north of Peking, off the highway that leads to the Great Wall at Badaling and the Ju Yong Pass. In the past, the Ming Tombs accommodated independent travelers who wished to linger around the more obscure tombs and reflect on the impermanence of imperial grandeur and political glory. These days, a new imperial edict has been issued. Aside from three of the tombs, apparatchiks have locked the other tumuli behind iron gates and wooden doors. The specific tombs addressed include Chang Ling, Ding Ling, Zhao Ling, De Ling, Yong Ling, Jing Ling, Xian Ling, Qing Ling, Yu Ling, Mao Ling, Kang Ling, Tai Ling, and Si Ling.

A trip to the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall can also include a visit to the Silver Mountain Pagoda Forest in Chang Ping County. The pagoda “forest” consists of seven pagodas built in a valley with a mountain range cradling them in the background. Chan Buddhism delightfully challenges the acolyte to break dualistic thought through a sudden flash of enlightenment that attends meditation on an impossible riddle. The tombs are modeled closely on the Ming Tombs, though they do not rise to the same level of exquisite design. The Temple of the Cloud Place was originally constructed in the sixth century by a monk called Jing Yuan. It is believed that there is no more fitting place to bring to close the wanderings in Old Peking.

This chapter reviews the emerging evidence for the archaeology of Skye and the Western Isles during the medieval period and later, for part of which the region was ruled by the Lords of the Isles. It examines the evolution of the baile, the architectural form of the blackhouse, and medieval castles like Kismul Castle in Barra. It also considers the symbolism and architecture of the tombs of the medieval elite.

In September 1968, Allen Jones walked for the first time through the doors of Morris High School, the school that he had enrolled in after he failed out of Taft High School. Jones had finished his second year at Taft High School the same way he finished his first: partying, getting high, and selling drugs. However, he had the feeling things were going to be different for him here somehow. The whole school and everyone in it seemed to expect trouble. Jones realized that, yet again, he had stepped into a world that he would need to learn to navigate. He was in a school and a neighborhood where everyone—even the teachers and principal—was street smart, and he would have a much harder time hiding his double life. This chapter further describes Jones's experience leading up to The Tombs—that is what they call the jailhouse down in Manhattan.

This chapter describes Allen Jones's time inside The Tombs. The night he spent in that jailhouse was the longest of his life. He was locked inside a cell with ten or twelve men, some of them pretty desperate looking and all of them claiming to be innocent. Some were sober, but most were drunk or high on drugs. The next morning arrived, at last, and they transported them to Rikers Island early. Rikers is the prison where people awaiting trial in New York City are held until they are freed or convicted and sent upstate. The sun was shining that morning, and as he saw The Rock from a distance, it looked like a school. As they rode through the streets to get to the bridge that would take them to the prison, Jones looked at all the people going about their business and he yearned to be like them, free to be in the everyday world.

Very little is known about Karakhamun and Karabasken, despite their importance for this period. This chapter lays out the excavation, conservation, and reconstruction of their tombs. It also takes a broader look at the chronology of the necropolis through the architectural development and decoration of the tombs in the area, seeking to understand their places within public and private tombs, as well as to explore the position and lives of their owners.

Archaism is a key factor in Late Period Theban tomb decoration, and this chapter explores this in the tombs of Karakhamun and Karabasken. It looks at the style of carving, the use of imagery and iconography, and techniques and innovations employed. This chapter concludes that the tomb was decorated in a relatively short period of time by a large number of building and artistic teams, yet was never completed.

Eigner revisits and builds on earlier work done on Karakhamun's tomb in the 1970s, through the new excavations of the South Asasif Project. He presents a plan of the tomb, as well as section drawings, and a detailed discussion of the decoration and architectural features of the tomb. He draws comparisons to other relevant tombs, such as TT 37 Hawra and TT 390 Irtieru, and explains how they follow the principles of temple architecture.

This chapter tells the story of Bill vanden Heuvel's work with the New York City prison system. Following riots in the Tombs detention center and a rash of suicides in late 1970, Mayor John Lindsay asked vanden Heuvel to serve as Chair of the Board of Correction, a post he held for three years. During that time, he made numerous proposals to improve conditions in the New York City prison system, developing novel approaches to health care, education, training and living conditions. His legal training gave him an eye for spotting inequities in bail and sentencing procedures, and he worked closely with advocates both inside and outside the prisons to create a system that could be remedial as well as punitive. The chapter includes his speech at a service of concern after deadly riots broke out at Attica State Prison in September 1971. His ideas for improving media coverage of the prisons are presented in his article "The Press and the Prisons," first published in June 1972.

The shift between Hafit (ca. 3100–2700 BC) and Umm an-Nar (ca. 2700–2000 BC) mortuary traditions on the Oman Peninsula is poorly understood, primarily because the semi-nomadic communities of this liminal period left little to the archaeological record, with the exception of monumental tombs. Because of the ambiguity surrounding this transition, tombs from this time are typically classified as either ‘Hafit’ or ‘Umm an-Nar’ without regard for the considerable geographic and temporal variation in tomb structure and membership throughout southeastern Arabia. Recent survey and excavation of a Bronze Age necropolis at Al Khubayb in the Sultanate of Oman have revealed Transitional tombs that—far from exhibiting a simplified dichotomy—represent a blurring of the traditionally discrete boundaries dividing the Hafit and Umm an-Nar periods. Bioarchaeological analyses of tombs at Al Khubayb further enable researchers to make a distinction between tomb types and elucidate the process by which mortuary treatments changed. Over the late fourth and into the early third millennium BC, these entombment practices changed from (a) relatively small, roughly-hewn limestone tombs known as Hafit-type cairns to (b) Transitional tombs displaying features intermediary to both Hafit and Umm an-Nar period mortuary structures to (c) large, expertly-constructed Umm an-Nar communal tombs.

In Fall 1970, the Young Lords again occupied the FSUMC church, in response to the shocking death of one of their own, Julio Roldan, who after a false arrest was found hanged in the Tombs, NYC’s notorious detention center. The occupation happened against the backdrop of a prisoner uprising in the Tombs, a precursor to the Attica Rebellion. At the occupied church, the Young Lords mounted a precursor to contemporary movements against mass incarceration and for abolition. They launched a legal defense center to aid poor Black and Latino prisoners; challenged the politics of bail; denounced state repression of the left; the politics of law and order, and the hyper imprisonment of people of color. They identified structural violence, poverty, and racism as root causes of social problems and supported the redistribution of resources and wealth through the revolutionary overthrown of capitalism. The group’s radical actions led to the first official investigation of the death of a single prisoner, Julio Roldan. Roldan’s arrest and arraignment offered a window into the botched legal process that, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exponentially increased the arrest and jailing of people of color living in urban centers.

This chapter highlights the city jail, where William Crummie took Amelia Norman on the night she attacked Henry Ballard. It describes the city jail as a massive, gloomy, stone structure known popularly as “the Tombs,” which had been encroached upon by city streets and gradually ruined by the waste emitted by tanneries, slaughterhouses, and breweries. It also talks about novelist Ned Buntline, who described the effect that the the Tombs' solemn stone assemblage of steps, columns, palm leaves, and winged, snake-surrounded sphere had on one of his characters. The chapter looks at the Dickensian rhetoric, which was part of the melodramatic nineteenth-century literary and journalistic style that celebrated the titillating horrors of the slum. It cites the Tombs's multiple official names that expressed its various functions, such as City Prison, Halls of Justice, and House of Detention.

This chapter discusses how Amelia Norman attracted new and influential friends during her time in the Tombs, which became more important to her than any of her fellow inmates proved to be. It recounts how Amelia's new friends read moral and political meanings into her ordeal that went well beyond the sensational interests of the press and even the boundaries of her own experience. It also refers to popular author and reformer Lydia Maria Child, who became Amelia's chief protector throughout her trial and afterward. The chapter describes Lydia as a committed reformer who by the early 1830s was deeply embroiled in abolition. It talks about how Lydia came to New York in May 1841 to edit the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly newspaper published by William Lloyd Garrison's American Anti-Slavery Society.

This chapter discusses Amelia Norman's attempt to hang herself in her cell on the morning of her trial on January 15, 1844 in the Court of Sessions in the Tombs. It cites Lydia Maria Child, who stated that the defection of Amelia's lawyer, Thomas Warner, had proved too much for a spirit that had so long been under the pressure of extreme despondency. It also talks about the three judges who made up the Court of Sessions and sat on the top tier of a high platform, dwarfing the lawyers who performed beneath them. The chapter highlights Frederick Augustus Tallmadge, who served as the presiding judge, and two aldermen, Elijah F. Purdy and David Vandervoort, the three city officials that formed the Court of Sessions during Amelia's trial. It reveals that Purdy was the acting mayor when Amelia had unsuccessfully appealed a seduction complaint against Henry Ballard after he had her arrested for prostitution.