A recent Kayak.com blog entry featured places that pay homage to figures whose lives were cut short by an assassin’s hand. Sounds like grief tourism to me and some of the destinations are featured on grief-tourism.com. You’ve got Rome, where Caesar was assassinated. You’ve got Dallas where there’s a famous grassy knoll on the north side of [...]

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From 1940 to 1945, a concentration camp located in Mauthausen, Austria was a place of torture and murder for hundreds of thousands of people during World War II.   Prisoners consisted of men, women and children from various races and creeds.  By 1945, more than 15,000 or over 19% of the total prison population were children [...]

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Thanatourism is derived from the Ancient Greek word thanatos in mythology, for the personification of death.  Thanatourism is an extreme form of grief tourism that involves the dark contemplation of death at the time of its occurrence.  Every religion has a different approach to death and in the mountains of Tibet, there is (from the [...]

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Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the U.S., died in Santa Monica, California, on June 5, 2004, at the age of 93.  For many of us, Reagan had been gone for over 10 years, a slow fading away in the progressive stages of Alzheimer’s disease.  Perhaps, as his memory began to fail, we too chose [...]

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Cemeteries have a strange and macabre attraction for the curious and the morose.  The dark symbolism of granite headstones, monuments, and crypts, viewed by some with sorrow and grief, is often no more than a part of a sightseeing itinerary for the general populace. Pere-LaChaise in Paris, France, a burial place for such notable figures [...]

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Gettysburg battlefield in Pennsylvania, the scene of the largest conflict ever fought in the Western Hemisphere, is considered by many to be the final turning point of the Civil War.  For three days, the brave armies of the North and South fought against each other, each equally strong in their beliefs, and each reluctant to [...]

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Alacatraz prison, officially closed in 1963, sits on an island of 22 acres, surrounded by freezing waters and rapid currents.  Juan Manuel de Ayala, who gave it the name of La Isla de las Alcatreces, “the Island of the Pelicans,” discovered the island in 1775.  In 1850, Alcatraz, better known as “the Rock,” was established [...]

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We watched in disbelief and horror the tragedy unfold on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.  Never before had the peace and security of the United States been threatened with such evil and disaster.  This was to be no ordinary day for any of us and tragically, for some, it would be the last day of their [...]

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The states along the Gulf Coast of the U.S. have a reason to fear the onset of hurricane season and the inevitable disasters that occur. Storm warnings had been issued from Florida to Louisiana and yet, many thought this would be just another hurricane. On August 29, 2005 Katrina came ashore, bringing a storm surge [...]

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It was a cruel event that made Hiroshima the tourist attraction that it is today. The United States War Department, in accordance with the Manhattan Project, issued the final order for the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan on July 25th, 1945.  On August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m., the first atomic bomb in the world, flown [...]

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