{"product_id":"just-enough-to-put-him-away-decent-9780252087219","title":"Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAs 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\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“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 \u003ci\u003eDon’t Think about Death: A Memoir on Mortality\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTable of Contents\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAcknowledgments \u003cp\u003e Introduction: Death and the South \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Part One. Death and the New South \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 1. Selling Our Dead: Evolving Rural Burial Practice \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 2. Heavenly Reunions and Progressive Reform \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 3. Life Extension and the Emergence of a Death Commerce System \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Part Two. World War I and Challenging Southern Death Care \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 4. Lonely Coffins: World War I and the Spanish Influenza Epidemic \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 5. Remembering the War, Forgetting the Flu, Burying the Military Dead \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Part Three. Death Care in the 1920s South \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 6. Purple Coffins and Cadillac Hearses: Purchasing a Good Death \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 7. Indifference, Shame, Selfishness and Wrong Living: New Ways to Grieve and Comfort \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 8. “Health is just everything”: Expanding Healthcare in the South in the 1920s \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Part Four. Death and the New Deal \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 9. Making Deadly Landscapes Healthier: The First New Deal \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 10. Revitalizing a Sick South: The Second and Third New Deals \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Part Five. Dying in World War II \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 11. Flying and Dying as Americans \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Chapter 12. Muddy Roads and Sacred Duties: Bringing Home the World War II Dead \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Epilogue \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Notes \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Bibliography \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Index \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Illinois Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":49400524243287,"sku":"9780252087219","price":19.79,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9780252087219.jpg?v=1730470894","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/just-enough-to-put-him-away-decent-9780252087219","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}