Description
Book SynopsisAs 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 i
Trade Review“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 MortalityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
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
