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Joy Giguere, Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent: Death Care, Life Extension, and the Making of a Healthier South, 1900–1955, Journal of American History, Volume 111, Issue 2, September 2024, Pages 376–377, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaae149
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Kristine M. McCusker's deeply researched study of southern death care, funerary practices, and efforts at “life extension” through improved health care services in the first half of the twentieth century examines historical themes that have largely been addressed by other scholars as separate, discrete topics. While in recent years an increased number of works have been published on southern cemeteries, funerals, health care and disease, and the racial politics that applied to all areas of southern life and death in this period, McCusker ably illustrates the interconnectedness of these themes within the broad transformations in urbanization, consumerism, and global war from the Progressive Era through World War II. Death care itself, McCusker argues, involved burial, mourning, and rituals of comfort to the living, and evolved in the twentieth century to include life extension, “fostered by an emerging death commercial industry and institutionalized by the federal government” (p. 1). As McCusker contends, contrary to the assertion of many other death scholars, death did not “die” in the wake of modern health care and life-extending technological advancements, but instead it became increasingly commercialized as death care professionals—burial societies, funeral directors, and insurance companies—took control over the physical, financial, and logistical aspects of care for dead bodies, while grieving southerners increasingly turned their attentions to the material products that had become newly available for expressing grief, condolence, and memorialization. Such products included scrapbooks, condolence cards, purple caskets and burial robes (especially for Black southerners), floral arrangements, and professionally carved gravestones and monuments. As her study centers on the American South, race is likewise a prominent theme, in particular the ways Black and white southerners “redefined, in conjunction and in opposition, what good death care was” (p. 2).
