Associate History Professor Micki McElya’s book, The Politics of Mourning: Death and Honor in Arlington National Cemetery (Harvard University Press), was named a 2017 Pulitzer Prize finalist for General Nonfiction. In its citation, the Pulitzer Prize committee called her work “a luminous investigation of how policies and practices at Arlington National Cemetery have mirrored the nation’s fierce battles over race, politics, honor, and loyalty.”

In the book’s introduction McElya writes, “Approaching Arlington National Cemetery as a site that is inclusive of all the nation’s stories, the wonderful, the messy, and the terrible, the awe-inspiring and shameful, the achingly beautiful and the devastatingly sad, is an opportunity to expand the contours of the honorable and brave, not diminish them.”