Guest blogger Kristine McCusker about her research

Dr. Kristine McCusker is a faculty member in the history department. She has a  Ph.D. in American History, Folklore, and Ethnomusicology from Indiana University and is the author of Lonesome Cowgirls and Honky-Tonk Angels: The Women of Barn Dance Radio (Illinois, 2008). In this blog entry she talks about her new research:

          I once said to a group of people that I study dead people. One person, John Lodl, head of the Rutherford County Archives, responded, “Kris, we all study dead people.” Yes, but my folks are already dead when I find them so I really do study literally dead people. My new manuscript, entitled Just Enough to Put Him Away Decent, is a National Institutes of Health-funded study of Southern death rituals between 1918-1945. It examines the evolution of “death care”: the burial of the dead, the grieving of the loss and the comfort given the grief-stricken. But I’m examining death care in era when Progressives were focusing on “life extension,” a campaign literally to extend life. Intriguingly, some of that impetus came from Southern Baptist Churches and some of my more interesting searches have been at the Southern Baptist Library and Archives in Nashville. The Southern Baptists founded hospitals and tuberculosis retreats to stave off early death, but in doing so, messed substantially with biblical prescriptions regarding life span. You were supposed to live three score and ten and then, go to your heavenly Father. What happened theologically, then, when Southerners began to live to eighty, ninety and even one hundred years?

           Some have found this research (and me) somewhat morbid. In fact, a dear friend said to me, “I realize you find this all interesting, but just so you know, you’re in a really weird place right now.” Yes, I am morbid, but when I started the work, my dad had just died and it helped me personally to see people grieving and then, being able to move on with their lives. These days, some three years into the project, death does bother me sometimes, although I find I am still quite comfortable being in that weird place. Seeing the large number of babies being buried has been difficult as has been the utterly painful, tragic deaths – the young woman who died because she ate a safety pin (probably an unidentified suicide) or the three children who died and were buried together during the Spanish Flu epidemic.

          But I have been charmed by the kindness extended to the grief-stricken. Frank Essex, professor emeritus in Political Science, told me about his funeral director father who had the Stuttgart (Arkansas) Air Force Base contract. His father buried16 men who died in airplane training accidents. Southerners believed that one had to bury the whole body, yet airplane crashes were catastrophic events for a body. How did Mr. Essex fix this? He used clothing to recreate the body. He tucked the socks into pants where there were no feet or legs, tied a tie around the neck that no longer existed, and all to complete the expected ritual because he knew it brought comfort to the family.

          So, I study dead people and it is morbid, but it is profoundly important work that reveals how well some acted even at the most difficult times in life.

Invitation to guest blog

With the new school year upon us, I want to remind everybody that guest bloggers are welcome. If you are interested, please let me know.

Wishing everyone a productive and intellectually stimulating school year.

CRM Field School 2010: Stewardship of the NPS at FOVA

The Fort Vancouver National Historic Site (FOVA) is composed of several historic components within a unified site. One part of the site contains an historically accurate re-creation of a former fort of the British Hudson's Bay Company's fur trading operations. The fort was established around 1824 and continued operating under British control until 1846 when the Oregon Treaty set the US–Canadian border at the 49th parallel north thus placing Fort Vancouver within American territory. The fort is situated on its original site near the Columbia River in present day Vancouver, Washington. Fort Vancouver was made a National Monument in 1944, and in the 1960s its boundaries were changed and it was redesignated as Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

MTSU CRM Field School 2010 students arrive on Monday, May 10 for the introductory session of the class.


MTSU students spent the first week of the CRM Field School Maymester class at Fort Vancouver getting an inside view of how the Pacific West Region of the National Park Service (NPS) works, particularly at FOVA. Our daily schedule included both classroom instruction and park tours conducted by the various NPS staffers who oversee operations at FOVA.


We received instruction about how the park staff implements the FOVA General Management Plan.


The NPS staff took turns guiding us around the various park assets. We were treated like V.I.P.s during our stay. NPS Rangers Kimm Fox-Middleton, Greg Shine, and new Ranger Aaron.


Cortney Gjesfjeld conducts one of the lectures for the CRM Field School.

Cortney C. Gjesfjeld, a Historical Landscape Architect and Cultural Resources expert with the Pacific West Region of the NPS, served as a special liaison and instructor for the entirety of our stay. Her involvement in our Field School was integral to our understanding of the complexities of cultural resources management. Plus, she was a great guide around Portland at night during our down time!

The restored fort is built on the footprint of the original fort but the orientation of the entrance has been moved to the rear to accommodate access to the visitors' parking lot.








Thus, visitors approach Fort Vancouver by means of a stroll through an interpretation of the original fort garden. It was a typical English garden and was located behind and outside the boundary of the fort, just beyond the massive gate.






To the east and west of the gardens are the original agricultural fields and apple and cherry orchards which are now being restored with historically accurate plantings.



Cortney gave us much insight into the process of re-creating a natural and cultural landscape accurately.





These stunning arbors are planted with hops!

Fort Vancouver CRM Field School

This semester, nine public history graduate students, along with Dr. Rebecca Conard, are studying cultural resource management practices at Fort Vancouver National Historic Site in Vancouver, Washington. The Cultural Resource Management (CRM) Field School, a Maymester class, commenced on Monday, May 10. For two weeks we will study the wide variety of national, state, and local partnerships that are involved in managing The Fort Vancouver National Historic Site as well as the Historic Columbia River Highway, the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park, and the Timberline Lodge National Historic Landmark. Our goal is to get a fix on the complexities of applying scholarship, theory and philosophy to cultural resource management.
In addition to Dr. Conard, participants include Virginia Wallace,
C. Sade Turnipseed, Keith Schumann, Katie Merzbacher, Meghan Fall, Brigitte Eubank, Kristen Baldwin Deathridge, David Calease, and Mona Brittingham. Our base of operations is across the river from Fort Vancouver in Portland, Oregon. We are staying at the Portland Hostel, a member of Hostel International, where we are enjoying a camaraderie reminiscent of the undergraduate college dorm.
We will report in from time to time to share our experiences.

From the Chair: The Tyranny of National Histories

I got back last night from a conference at the University of Heidelberg in Germany where I participated in a conference entitled "Lives Beyond Borders: Toward a Social History of Cosmopolitanism and Globalization." Although I definitely felt like the least cosmopolitan person there (all the papers and comments were in English, though I was almost the only person whose first language was English), it really gave me an opportunity to think more deeply about the people I study--international civil servants of the United Nations--as well as an entire host of other people whose histories--whose stories and biographies--don't naturally fall within the history of a particular country.

For example, one of the heroes of my book The Birth of Development, is Sir John Boyd Orr, the first Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1949. Since the British government had actively campaigned against his nomination to the FAO in the first place, it's not all that surprising that he's not remembered in British history. But he's equally forgotten in Scotland. If you visit Scotland and find yourself at the William Wallace Monument outside Stirling (because you haven't yet taken Dr. Beemon's course and learned that Scotland is about more than Braveheart, kilts, and whiskey), you'll find Scotland's Hall of Heroes within the monument. Poet Robert Burns is there, Robert the Bruce, economist Adam Smith, and Sir Walter Scott, but no John Boyd Orr. Why? Perhaps he's not important to the history of Scotland. But in which Hall of Heroes should a man like Orr, who devoted his life to trying to feed people and eradicate hunger, be?

That was basically the question of the conference. When people have lived their lives in the world, when they've been important to the world, who keeps that historical memory? One commentator talked about the tyranny of national histories to describe the ways in which nations have become the keepers of historical memory. The danger in this is that we lose important histories and stories.

One of the papers that I commented on was the biography of Zhang Pengchun. He was the product of a new, modern education offered in the Nankai Middle School before studying at Clarke and Columbia universities in the United States (where he studied with John Dewey). He then served as Dean of the Tsinghua School in Peking and helped launch Peking opera in the United States. But by far his most significant contribution came from his work with the U.N. Human Rights Commission, where he worked tirelessly and largely as an individual with few instructions from his government (which was in the process of losing the Chinese civil war). In this role, he managed to hammer out a set of human rights (in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights) that exceeded Western ideas and that offered the promise of protection for people beyond the bounds of the nation-state. Where is his history commemorated and remembered? Certainly not in the country in which he was born, which is one of the chief human rights violators in the world. So if nations generate and keep histories, whose histories are lost and forgotten? How are we made poorer for forgetting these stories?

So take a moment to think about someone in your own research or reading who is important beyond the borders of a nation and why it's important that we study and know about her or him. Feel free to share as a comment and join in the conversation!

Check out History Research Blog

Ken Middleton, an MTSU History Department alumni and faculty member in the MTSU library has started a history research blog. Check it out here: History Research Blog. Ken will also, upon request, meet with your history classes to teach them about some of the research tools available in the library. Take some time to explore Ken's great new blog.

New department blog

So this is the beginning of the MTSU History Department blog. Ok, so blogging's been around since the 90s. We're not exactly on the cutting edge. But we are trying to do better at communicating as our department continues to grow and exciting stuff (well, exciting from a scholarly point of view) is happening all the time. We're hoping this blog will give us a chance to highlight the accomplishments of our students, faculty, and alumni, advertise events in the department, and explore the history of our local community a bit, and just generally improve communication.  Feel free to leave comments or, better yet, volunteer to be a guest blogger. You know you want to.