[190] "MTSU On The Record" Examines Southern Way of Death

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Nov. 11, 2009
EDITORIAL CONTACT: Gina Logue, 615-898-5081; WMOT-FM, 615-898-2800

“MTSU ON THE RECORD” EXAMINES SOUTHERN WAY OF DEATH
Historian Researches Public Health Policy Impact on Southern Attitudes on Dying
(MURFREESBORO) – “MTSU on the Record,” the 30-minute public affairs program that connects MTSU with the community at large, is moving to 8 a.m. each Sunday morning from its previous time of 7 a.m on WMOT-FM (89.5 and wmot.org).
This Sunday, Nov. 15, Dr. Kris McCusker, associate professor of history, will talk with host Gina Logue about her research into the impact of public health policy from 1918-1945 on attitudes toward death and dying in the South.
“In the South, whether one was black or white, death was a common and important part of the region’s self-conception, its ‘mind,’ in writer W.J. Cash’s words, since the death of young and old alike was ever present,” McCusker writes. “What happened, then, when public health policy, which assumed that dying was bad except in old age or on a battlefield, infiltrated the South?”
To hear last week’s program on the new MTSU Veterans Memorial, go to http://frank.mtsu.edu/~proffice/podcast2009.html and click on “November 8, 2009.” For more information, contact Logue at 615-898-5081 or WMOT-FM at 615-898-2800.

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With three Nobel Prize winners among its alumni and former faculty, Middle Tennessee State University confers master’s degrees in 10 areas, the Specialist in Education degree, the Doctor of Arts degree and the Doctor of Philosophy degree. MTSU is ranked among the top 100 public universities in the nation in the Forbes “America’s Best Colleges” 2009 survey.