ABOUT THIS BOOK

As the twentieth century began, Black and white southerners alike dealt with low life expectancy and poor healthcare in a region synonymous with early death. But the modernization of death care by a diverse group of actors changed not only death rituals but fundamental ideas about health and wellness.

Kristine McCusker charts the dramatic transformation that took place when southerners in particular and Americans in general changed their thinking about when one should die, how that death could occur, and what decent burial really means. As she shows, death care evolved from being a community act to a commercial one where purchasing a purple coffin and hearse ride to the cemetery became a political statement and the norm. That evolution also required interactions between perfect strangers, especially during the world wars as families searched for their missing soldiers. In either case, being put away decent, as southerners called burial, came to mean something fundamentally different in 1955 than it had just fifty years earlier.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Kristine McCusker is a professor of history, folklore, and ethnomusicology at Middle Tennessee State University. She is the author of Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio.

REVIEWS

“The history of death in the South during the twentieth century is much more complex, much more dynamically connected to modernizing trends, and much more revealing of social realities than previously imagined. McCusker not only explores historical change, but also the racial and political dimensions of changing attitudes toward death in the context of transformations in notions of health care and life extension.”--Gary Laderman, author of Don’t Think about Death: A Memoir on Mortality

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Death and the South

Part One. Death and the New South

Chapter 1. Selling Our Dead: Evolving Rural Burial Practice

Chapter 2. Heavenly Reunions and Progressive Reform

Chapter 3. Life Extension and the Emergence of a Death Commerce System

Part Two. World War I and Challenging Southern Death Care

Chapter 4. Lonely Coffins: World War I and the Spanish Influenza Epidemic

Chapter 5. Remembering the War, Forgetting the Flu, Burying the Military Dead

Part Three. Death Care in the 1920s South

Chapter 6. Purple Coffins and Cadillac Hearses: Purchasing a Good Death

Chapter 7. Indifference, Shame, Selfishness and Wrong Living: New Ways to Grieve and Comfort

Chapter 8. “Health is just everything”: Expanding Healthcare in the South in the 1920s

Part Four. Death and the New Deal

Chapter 9. Making Deadly Landscapes Healthier: The First New Deal

Chapter 10. Revitalizing a Sick South: The Second and Third New Deals

Part Five. Dying in World War II

Chapter 11. Flying and Dying as Americans

Chapter 12. Muddy Roads and Sacred Duties: Bringing Home the World War II Dead

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index