1950-2000
1900-1950
2000-2050
The United States has become increasingly divided over whether or not a fetus is a person who can die.
Organ donation by the newly dead has become popular.
Medical technology has created a large population of relatively healthy older people for the first time in history, leading to financial and medical decisions never faced by previous generations.
More and more in the medical profession, a cured patient represents success, while one who has died represents failure.
"Widowed dads" has always been a favorite Disney plot device.
Folks can get vaccinated against polio, rubella, chicken pox, pneumonia, meningitis and Lyme disease, all of them once potentially life-ending.
American soldiers falling in Vietnam and the Middle East have always been returned to the States for burial in elaborate and moving ceremonies in which the American flag is prominently featured.
Funeral homes offer "full service," from notification of the coroner to selection of the ostensibly "leak-proof" casket and on to final burial of the deceased.
Young rock musicians have come to fear induction into the 27 Club, which includes Brian Jones, Alan Wilson, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has famously formulated five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
Funeral homes have always offered elaborate and expensive services, such as embalming, to make the body seem pretty, handsome, at peace or distinguished for viewing in an open casket.
Notable deaths have included the assassinations of an American president and a civil rights pioneer.
1950 - Korean War begins
1953 - Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed for treason
1965 - U.S.A. escalates military role in Vietnamese civil war
1968 - Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated
1980 - John Lennon assassinated
1987 - U.S.A. and U.S.S.R. sign first in a series of treaties to reduce nuclear proliferation
1989 - Chinese authorities crush pro-democracy rebellion in Tiananmen Square
1995 - Federal building bombed in Oklahoma City
1999 - Columbine High School shootings
