This republic of suffering : death and the American Civil War / Drew Gilpin Faust.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Faust, Drew Gilpin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Social aspects.

United States.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Psychological aspects.

United States--History--Civil War, 1861-1865--Influence.

Death--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Death.

Death--United States--Psychological aspects--History--19th century.

Burial--Social aspects--United States--History--19th century.

Burial.

Burial--United States--Psychological aspects--History--19th century.

Physical Description:

346 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Summary:

An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, and reconceived its understanding of life after death.--From publisher description.

"An illuminating study of the American struggle to comprehend the meaning and practicalities of death in the face of the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War. During the war, approximately 620,000 soldiers lost their lives. An equivalent proportion of today's population would be six million. This book explores the impact of this enormous death toll from every angle: material, political, intellectual, and spiritual. Historian Faust delineates the ways death changed not only individual lives but the life of the nation and its understanding of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. She describes how survivors mourned and how a deeply religious culture struggled to reconcile the slaughter with its belief in a benevolent God, and reconceived its understanding of life after death. Faust details the logistical challenges involved when thousands were left dead, many with their identities unknown, on fields like Bull Run, Shiloh, Antietam, and Gettysburg. She chronicles the efforts to identify, reclaim, preserve, and bury battlefield dead, the resulting rise of undertaking as a profession, the first widespread use of embalming, the gradual emergence of military graves registration procedures, the development of a federal system of national cemeteries for Union dead, and the creation of private cemeteries in the South that contributed to the cult of the Lost Cause. She shows, too, how the war victimized civilians through violence that extended beyond battlefields--from disease, displacement, hardships, shortages, emotional wounds, and conflicts connected to the disintegration of slavery. Throughout, the voices of soldiers and their families, of statesmen, generals, preachers, poets, surgeons, and nurses, of northerners and southerners, slaveholders and freedpeople, of the most exalted and the most humble are brought together to give us a vivid understanding of the Civil War's most fundamental and widely shared reality. Were he alive today, 'This Republic of Suffering' would compel Walt Whitman to abandon his certainty that the "real war will never get in the books."" - Book Jacket

Contents:

Preface: The work of death

Dying: "to lay down my life"

Killing: "the harder courage"

Burying: "new lessons caring for the dead"

Naming: "the significant word UNKNOWN"

Realizing: civilians and the work of mourning

Believing and doubting: "what means this carnage?"

Accounting: "our obligations to the dead"

Numbering: "how many? how many?"

Epilogue: Surviving.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 273-322) and index.

National Book Awards finalist (Nonfiction), 2008

Local Notes:

Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Sheldon Hackney.

Storage copy signed in front by Sheldon Hackney.

Storage copy has extensive MS. notes by Sheldon Hackney at end.

ISBN:

9780375404047

037540404X

9780375703836

0375703837

OCLC:

123232283